background
programme
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Session #5: Saturday, 10 January, 14.15 - 16.00 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Rinku Lamba, Assistant Professor, CPS, JNU (rlamba9@hotmail.com)
Chair/discussant: Susan Vishwanathan, Sociology, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU (susanvisvanathan@hotmail.com)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This panel explores different languages of power and of resistance. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”? What are the different pictures of law and community in different spheres of law and life in everyday contexts?
This paper analyses the relationships between rural women, local communities and the state as expressed and experienced through the nari adalat, an informal legal structure and process run by poor, rural women in the state of Gujarat. More specifically, the nari adalats or women’s courts that I describe are an initiative organised by women involved in the Mahila Samakhya, a state-sponsored programme for the empowerment of rural women, an effort that emerged and began taking on cases of domestic violence, divorce, recovery of streedhan and maintenance in 1995. Based on fieldwork with four adalats in Vadodara District, the paper explores the nari adalat as a dynamic public arena, which while asserting itself as an alternative to both panchayat and court, draws on multiple resources from community and state to craft the scripts, codes, props and discourses that make up the nari adalat and its repertoire of practices. Thus, the adalat’s women situate themselves within government compounds while designing their schedule around the daily rhythms of their village lives. They draw on their experience as community members, rely on their understanding of local customs, and use networks of social relations to resolve disputes. But they also assert their identities as functionaries associated with a government programme, deploy a range of state symbols in structuring their procedures, approach the police for protection, and cite formal laws. This constant interplay between community and state is both practical and creative and in the process, is beginning to change the terms of women’s relationships with state and community, enabling them to access and use formal institutions and gaining recognition within their villages. Shuttling between multiple structures of support and oppression, however, these women activists also encounter new constraints and new forms of insecurity inside and outside their homes and the programme. By investigating the nari adalat as a lively public arena located between community and state, this paper argues for a nuanced and contextually shifting understanding of both realms and the opportunities and limitations they present for women’s activism, participation and social change.
In this presentation I want to explore the figure of the ‘mufti’ to examine its contemporary meaning and significance in mediating family disputes in Hyderabad. While muftis were an integral part of the administration of justice during the pre-colonial period, after the subordination of ‘Mohammaden law’ to the modern law they got relegated to its margins. Over the last thirty years, though much attention has been showered in the contemporary media on their ‘controversial’ anti-women fatwas, their role and function have remained relatively unexplored. Questions such as why they are sought out by people; the status of their advice or rulings among the population that they address; their contemporary roles and relevance do not seem to find a place here. My interest in these issues arose during my research on the nature of mediations of family disputes among Muslims in Hyderabad. While progressive Muslim groups think the muftis are ‘backward’, secular Muslim groups consider them as having outlived their time. Within the modern Muslim discourse in Hyderabad, the muftis do not have a place in everyday life. But, when I came across ‘modernized’ believing Muslim families that routinely consulted muftis for Quran/Hadith based advice on wide ranging issues from inheritance, marriage, marital disputes etc. it seemed necessary to investigate their contemporary role. Operation of Muslim personal law in the ‘secular’ domain of the family courts and the ‘community’ domain has attracted much scholarly attention in the recent years, its prehistory nearly forgotten and the continuous traffic between the two domains not acknowledged. This paper, focusing on the interactions of a single mufti with a set of families over years, tries to locate his role in the web of contemporary debates around family and law among the Muslims in Hyderabad. Through this exercise the paper hopes to contribute to the emerging field of the minorities and the law.
This paper focuses on the manner in which religiosity was contested and defined through legal discourses in the highly communal atmosphere of late colonial India. In particular, it engages with the ever-fraught issue of how legal access to shared sacred spaces shaped the boundaries of religious ‘publics’ through a case-study of the Bodh Gaya Temple Bills. This legislative project of first the colonial state and second the Indian nation state, culminating in the Act of 1948, sought to regulate the co-existing and conflicting claims of multiple religious groups to control over the site, which was and remains a space of sanctity and worship for Buddhists and Hindus alike. The various bills proposed, as the paper will seek to demonstrate, were organically shaped by heated debates between socio-religious reformers, such as the Sanatana Dharma and associated Hindu socio-religious organisations, and other religious associations such as the Mahabodhi Society, representing Buddhist pressure groups from India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand and Japan. By analyzing these debates, the paper will examine the local and trans-national dimensions of the topic.