The possibilities and implications of legal pluralism have long interested scholars exploring the Indian state's relationship to family, religion, and gender equality. In a situation complicated by violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims at the time of India's independence, lawmakers faced a predicament unique to multireligious societies with a colonial legacy of recognizing the autonomy of religious communities in family laws: should conjugal and family relationships be governed by a uniform, state-produced civil code applicable to all communities, or should communities be granted autonomy in such matters of “personal” law? In her ambitious, rich, and comprehensive study, Gopika Solanki examines the specific manifestations of legal pluralism through which state and community actors, social groups, activists in the women's movement, and individual litigants in postcolonial India mediate these tensions in the adjudication of marriage, divorce, and maintenance cases. She describes the Indian situation in terms of a “shared adjudication model” in which the state recognizes the laws and customary regulations of religious communities pertaining to the family, and shares its adjudicative authority with them.
A key question for Solanki's inquiry centers on the implications of this model for gender justice. In a marked departure from the concerns Indian feminist scholars have voiced about the tensions between cultural autonomy and gender equality in matters of family law, Solanki suggests that the Indian model of shared adjudication, granting legal recognition to culturally plural versions of what constitutes marriage, divorce, and family, brooks the possibility of ensuring greater gender equality. Further, unlike many scholars who associate the recognition of religious family laws with an ossification of religious boundaries and possible intensifications of interreligious tensions, Solanki contends that the shared adjudication model facilitates interreligious dialogue through deliberations among Hindu and Muslim women's organizations, secular women's groups, and litigants and lawyers from both communities.
The author makes a strong case for her choice of Mumbai as a site for this research, given the substantial presence of both majority Hindu and minority Muslim communities in the city and the simmering “communal” tensions between them in India's recent past. Hindu and Muslim litigants in the city approach a variety of formal and informal legal forums, where Solanki studies the “micropolitics of adjudication” (21). Methodologically, her research combines content analyses of court records and judgments with ethnographic research in the form of interviews that enrich her analysis, especially in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 3 focuses on the adjudication of religious family laws at the state-run family court in Mumbai. In chapter 4, Solanki compares the way three different caste councils, or panchayats, in Mumbai decide marriage- and divorce-related cases, while in chapter 5 she discusses how Muslim personal law is adjudicated at a community court, sect council, and informal legal forums. She argues that interactions at these plural and intersecting legal sites produce, negotiate, and contest varied perceptions of conjugality, religious membership, gender roles, and family obligations. Some examples come to light through Solanki's discussion of the complex questions that emerge at these sites: Is marriage a matter of individual choice, or is it subject to community approval (chapter 3)? Are women seen as economic actors under Hindu personal law as interpreted by different caste groups? How do those deciding upon the provision of maintenance to women litigants factor in women's contribution to household income (chapter 4)? Under Muslim personal law, can a man ask for unilateral divorce unconditionally, or can his use of this provision be restrained and regulated to prevent its misuse against women (chapter 5)?
At first, Solanki appears to suggest that it is the sheer plurality of state and nonstate legal actors and forums she encounters that provides the possibility to negotiate women's rights. However, she succeeds in providing a more nuanced and compelling set of reasons for the effectiveness of the shared adjudication model. These include the ideological diversity of the entities involved and specific sociopolitical developments in postcolonial India, such as many political parties' support of the rights of religious minorities to undermine the Hindu right wing; the democratization of some caste councils, which rendered them amenable to law reform; and India's autonomous women's movement, committed since the late 1980s to working with community leaders toward the reform of religious family laws and caste regulations in favor of women. The proactive nature of the Indian judiciary in enforcing women's economic rights in marriage and divorce is another significant factor. Last but not the least, Solanki highlights the agency of individual women litigants, women's groups, and legal professionals and their networks and linkages in creatively drawing upon religious laws and the secular laws of the state to maximize legal gains, especially in securing maintenance. These instances of forum shopping and switching gleaned from her interviews are Solanki's most interesting contribution to scholarly understandings of gender justice and, potentially, of legal consciousness in India.
The book is clearly written, if somewhat repetitive, and the breadth of the investigation is impressive and groundbreaking. Solanki engages and brings together hefty and intricate topics that have been abiding concerns for scholars of South Asia, such that the premise of each chapter could indeed make for a book on its own. With so much packed into the analysis, readers unfamiliar with Indian history, politics, and legal processes might find themselves seeking more explanation on some of the central categories Solanki invokes—personal laws, caste regulations, panchayats, the hierarchy of state courts, and so on. This book would be of interest to social science scholars working on South Asia, religion, gender and the state, postcolonial legal studies, and law and society more generally.
