Mary E. John | Uniform Civil Code & Indian Feminism

This presentation will examine the historical trajectories of how communities in the Indian context came to be uniquely identified in the struggle over women from the colonial period to the present. The story of the twists and turns of women’s agonistic relation to culture has been recursively deepened in terms of women’s possible rights within and beyond religious communities, or to put it more strongly, the story of women and culture is today practically coterminous with the trajectories of religiously defined communities and their respective patriarchies. Not only is there no equivalent pressure to bring caste in the picture, but questions of caste have entailed radically different conceptualisations of community. The diverging trajectories of caste and religious community become more evident in the course of the twentieth century, during the time when women’s organisations took on the tasks of social reform and sought, among other agendas, to intervene in, if not overcome the codification and reform of personal law, in favour of a uniform civil code.

The thinking of someone like B.R. Ambedkar in his efforts to establish a transformed Hindu Code for the new nation in the realm of personal law, one that would not only be gender just but play its part in the annihilation of caste, has only quite recently been recovered in mainstream scholarship. If feminists have been somewhat better able to locate the crisis experienced by Muslim women caught in the crosshairs or intersections of secular nationalism, default Hindu majoritarianism and an embattled minority culture, the legacy of anti-caste movements for thinking about culture as communities remains far less clear.