Search

This article analyses the continued denial of equality to women in India's religious personal laws by focusing on the rights of brothers and sisters to illustrate the repeated failures of law. Although this failure has been normalised by deploying various conceptual tools, these theoretical trends need to be challenged. This article examines the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act which, although giving women extensive property rights, still gave sisters lesser rights than their brothers. It demonstrates that the concept of religious personal laws is a construct which is often used uncritically, and that it legitimises the denial of equal rights to women. The paper combines critical geography scholarship and legal feminist insights to argue that the law must be aware of spatial practices and that it is essential for legal thinkers to engage with the law in more than an instrumental sense. It analyses the processes of knowledge production and explores how the constitutive aspects of legal knowledge can be better integrated into legal scholarship. It thus aims to make visible the many spaces of the law: where laws are made; where ideas about men and women as owners of property are normalised; and where the law is expected to be implemented. It argues for legal scholars to be present and engaged in the contestation of meanings of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the concept of religious personal laws as used in Indian legal discourse. This concept is used to denote religious laws of various communities that are claimed to be upheld but not modified by the secular state and also to refer to the religion related rules followed by communities outside of state regulation. This existence of various 'religious' laws is increasingly being described as legal pluralism. The ambiguous status of religious personal laws serves to legitimize the continued denial by the state of gender equality to women in family law matters as it creates a space for rules or laws to operate that do not conform to the Constitutional requirements and yet are enforced by the state. When legal scholars deploy this concept un-reflexively they participate in the discourse formation about religious personal laws as exceptional laws or as (progressive) examples of legal pluralism. In this way they assist the state in using the concept as a mode of governance. In this article it is argued that the legal scholars need to accept responsibility for the significant power they wield as discourse formers and acknowledge the power of naming legal practices. They are the scholars who can and should deconstruct the concept of religious personal laws. This is necessary for a serious engagement with the issue of what kind of family law would be truly non-oppressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses gender inequality and religious personal laws (RPLs) in India. The first part of the article explores the origin of the concept of RPLs and their selective reform by the state. The second part traces the development of various feminist legal responses to the issue of gender equality and the post-structural proliferation of differences. The third part illustrates how the shape of RPLs has repercussions for the design and scope of other laws. The last part develops an argument for a reconceptualizing of categories that allow for pursuing differences and justice together.