Description

The distinct personal laws that govern the major religious groups are a major aspect of Indian multiculturalism and secularism. States that inherited personal laws reflecting specific cultural norms adopted different approaches to recognition and family regulation. India changed its personal laws less than Turkey and Tunisia, but far more than Algeria, Syria, and Lebanon, and increased women’s rights and individual liberties in certain ways, contrary to the trend in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, and Nigeria since the 1970s. Moreover, Hindu law was changed earlier and more extensively than the minority laws.

Ruling elites’ discourses about the nation, its cultural groups, and its traditions interact with the state-society relations that regimes inherit and the projects of regimes to change society. These interactions influence the pattern of multiculturalism, the place of religion in public policy and public life, and forms of family regulation. They led India to introduce moderate yet sustained personal law reforms. Further, the greater engagement of political elites with Hindu initiatives and the predominant place of Hindu motifs in nationalist discourses shaped Indian multiculturalism. They were crucial reasons why policy-makers changed Hindu law far more although support for personal law reform was not clearly higher among Hindus.

Narendra Subramanian is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University. He studies the politics of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, and race in a comparative perspective, focusing primarily on India. Subramanian’s first book (Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India, Oxford University Press, 1999) examined why the mobilization of intermediate and lower status groups through discourses of language and caste reinforced democracy and tolerance in Tamil Nadu, southern India. His second book (Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India, Stanford University Press, 2014) traced the course of the personal laws that govern family life among India’s major religious groups. He is currently engaged in a project comparing the effects of political rights on the socio-economic status of two historically bonded groups, titled From Bondage to Citizenship: The Enfranchisement and Advancement of Dalits and African-Americans.