Family Matters: Citizenship and Marriage in India, 1939-72.

Abstract

India’s system of separate Hindu, Muslim, and Christian family laws is often cast as a threat to national unity. In contrast, I argue that Indian law was structured by the emphasis of English law on preserving the marriage tie and wives’ legal dependence on their husbands. Based on a study of judicial and bureaucratic decisions about families in Indian law,I show that a patriarchal English family structure based in coverture influenced Indian women’s experiences of the law at least as much as religious norms did.I focus on three legal devices: domicile, restitution of conjugal rights, and maintenance. I argue that “law of the family” is a better category with which to consider women’s rights than “family law.” “Law of the family” suggests the ways in which family statuses structured many aspects of Indian law, including those concerned with family disputes as well as matters such as citizenship. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part studies bureaucratic and judicial decisions about the status of wives and sons in Indian citizenship law. Through the legal device of domicile, coverture structured Indian citizenship law.The second part is based in a survey of matrimonial litigation in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh between 1939 and 1972. Litigants of all religious communities used restitution of conjugal rights suits and maintenance suits to seek marital redress even after important statutory reforms such as the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act (1939) and the Hindu Marriage Act (1955). Courts ruled in favor of wives without condemning marital violence. An individual wife could win her suit without necessarily challenging the patriarchal structure of marriage.Wives faced difficulties in proving matrimonial violence and often won their suits on the grounds of more easily proved social offenses. Husbands often challenged wives with arguments about both geographic and religious jurisdiction, in a pattern found in England as well. The dissertation concludes with a study of the 1962 UP Amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act, which made cruelty a ground for divorce in the state, providing a model for national reform fourteen years later.