Adjudication in religious family laws : cultural accommodation, legal pluralism, and women's rights in India

Multi-religious and multi-ethnic democracies face the challenge of constructing accommodative arrangements that can both facilitate cultural diversity and ensure women's rights within religio-cultural groups. This thesis is an investigation of the Indian state's policy of legal pluralism in recognition of religious family laws in India. The Indian state has adopted a model of what I have termed "shared adjudication" in which the state shares its adjudicative authority with internally heterogeneous religious groups and civil society in the regulation of marriage among Hindus and Muslims.Combining theoretical frameworks of state-society relations, feminist theory, and legal pluralism, and drawing from ethnographic research conducted in state courts, caste and sect councils, and "doorstep law courts," I pay analytical attention to state-society interactions at the interface of religious family laws. State and non-state sources of legal authority construct internally contested and heterogeneous notions of the conjugal family, gender relations, and religious membership, and they transmit them across legal spheres. These dynamic processes of communication reconstitute the interiors of religious, state, and civic legal orders, and they fracture the homogenised religious identities grounded in hierarchical gender relations within the conjugal family.Within the interstices of state and society---which are used imaginatively by state and societal actors---the Indian model points towards an open-ended and process-oriented conception of state-society relations that encompasses not only the binary of conflict and cooperation, but also communication between state and society. The "shared adjudication" model facilitates diversity as it allows the construction of hybrid religious identities, creates fissures in ossified group boundaries, and provides institutional spaces for ongoing inter-societal dialogue between religious groups, civil society, and the state. This pluralized legal sphere, governed by ideologically diverse legal actors, can thus increase women's rights in law, and despite its limitations, the transformative potential of women's collective agency effects institutional change