Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. xvii, 377 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8878-6.
The making of modern India has been defined by a tension between a vision of a secular Indian republic based on the equal rights of individuals as citizens, and claims for recognition of group rights based on custom, tradition and religion. Key sites of contestation have been personal law, family, and gender. This has been the case since the early nineteenth century, which marked not just the beginnings of modern ideas of nationhood, individual rights, and development, but also that of reinvented tradition and recasting of women. This contestation continues into the second decade of the twenty-first-century India, visible in the 2014 General Elections and their aftermath. Personal law remains a contentious issue and is seen as a marker dividing religious communities rather than being about women’s rights. This has been grounds for misunderstandings between different social groups in India and between the state and community leaders, as is clearly seen in the Shah Bano and Deorala Sati cases in the 1980s, or more recently in the Khap Panchayats’ statements regarding honour killings and demands for change in the Hindu law. Personal laws are often posited as necessarily backward vis a vis more liberal codified laws. The Hindus are likewise deemed as more modern than the Muslims. The history of codification of law and reforms within communities is more complex.
Narendra Subramanian’s book is important in such a context. It is a scholarly, painstakingly researched work that delves into the complex ways that state-society relations and discourses of community have developed through interaction leading to a particular kind of nation formation, recognition and family law (46). The six chapters that constitute the book begin with a focus on Indian personal law in chapter 1, but importantly with a comparative perspective that provides an excellent overview of the varied experiences of many colonial states in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands in negotiating the tension between recognition, equality, and liberty. The focus on diverse state policies in such countries as Tunisia and Turkey, which prioritized “the promotion of their visions of modernity,” the pursuit of traditions that “upheld lineage authority” in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria and a mix of the modern and traditional in South Asia where “ruling elites were allied with modernist urban elites, as well as with traditionalist religious, ethnic and kin leaders,” allows the reader to locate the Indian story in a broader framework. Chapter 2 develops the comparison forward within a theoretical framework that looks at the way nations are imagined and at approaches to family life. The analysis breaks from the dominant postcolonial understanding in western academia of the persistence of colonial forms of knowledge and poststructuralist emphasis on how discursive practices shape state projects. As someone whose early work was on a related area, I am in complete agreement that such conclusions are based on lack of empirical investigation coupled with a theoretical failure to pay attention to the dynamics of state strategies and social movements that did offer and push alternative models (Maitrayee Chaudhuri, The Indian Women’s Movement: Reform and Revival, Radiant, Delhi, 1993)
Chapter 3, with its focus on official nationalism and majoritarian citizen-making, explores the changes in Hindu law since the 1960s. These are further detailed in chapter 4 on recasting the normative national family, while chapter 5 discusses the experiences pertaining to the laws governing India’s two largest religious minorities, the Muslims and Christians before moving on to the concluding chapter 6 which returns to the core theme of nationalism, multiculturalism and personal law.
A comparative perspective allows the author to push an important argument that the traditions of many cultural and religious groups provide for extensive reforms that enhance women’s rights and individual liberties (286). But states have used this to a very limited extent. An important comparison that the book draws upon here is that between reforms in India and Indonesia. Many religious scholars and policy elites in Indonesia incorporated in their construction of indigenous Islam certain customs that were shared by the members of different religious communities. Unlike in India, personal laws of minorities in Indonesia therefore saw greater reforms. For India this is a significant point. The decline of syncretic tradition and consolidation of what is deemed ‘pure’ Hindu’ and ‘classical’ Islam has been extensively documented. Importantly, this was in part linked to colonial state policy. The book concludes with the important observation that although culturally grounded initiatives for personal reform were present among both Muslims and Hindus, the focus after independence shifted to Hindu law. In the author’s words, the story may have been different “if governing elites had operated with different understandings of the nation and its traditions” (275). A curious absence in the book is the tragic and violent outcome of Partition that may have had long-term implications for postcolonial legal reform of personal law.
This book stands out for a couple of reasons. For one, its scholarship and empirical details and the body of literature and archival sources that it marshals which will be of immense use to students; second, its historical perspective and comparative analysis opens up the issue in a very different manner than has played out in India’s dominant public discourse; third, it deploys key social science categories such as institutions, ideas, interests, and social movements to understand the detours that personal law debates take. In doing so, this study breaks from the theoretical trend that has dominated academia in the last two decades or more, namely one that has paid disproportionate attention to textual analysis with a focus on specific texts and discourses to the neglect of empirical study of how groups of people act in resistance or domination, negotiation and alliance.
Maitrayee Chaudhuri
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India