Negotiating the boundaries : gender and community in India

Personal laws regulate the family, which is the sphere in which Indian women experience the sharpest discrimination. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom from discrimination, Muslim personal law perpetuates the subordination of women within the family. The political manipulation of Muslim personal law reform by the State and by fundamentalist leaders has resulted in the marginalization of Muslim women's interests. This thesis focuses on the issue of Muslim women's equality within the family. It explores how arguments relating to 'religion', 'culture' and 'group identity' have been used to subordinate Muslim women. Their rights have been recast as oppositional to Muslim collective interests. In this context, there is a critical need to interrogate hegemonic categories that bind Muslim women to an essentialist notion of identity and deny the possibility of internal challenges to Muslim tradition. This thesis seeks to problematize and contest the exclusion of Muslim women's voices from the very discourse that attempts to define their rights and articulate their interests. It aims to reconceptualize and reformulate the frameworks within which inequality and discrimination are sought to be addressed