Adjudication In Religious Family Laws Cultural Accommodation Legal Pluralism And Gender Equality In India

"How do multireligious and multiethnic societies construct accommodative arrangements that can both facilitate cultural diversity and ensure women's rights? Based on a rich ethnography of legal adjudication of marriage and divorce across formal and informal arenas in Mumbai, this book argues that the shared adjudication model in which the state splits its adjudicative authority with religious groups and other societal sources in the regulation of marriage can potentially balance cultural rights and gender equality. In this model, the ideologically diverse lay, civic, and religious sources of legal authority construct, transmit, and communicate heterogeneous notions of the conjugal family, gender relations, and religious membership within the interstices of state and society. In so doing, they fracture the homogenized religious identities grounded in hierarchical gender relations within the conjugal family. 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 intersocietal dialog. In this pluralized legal sphere, individual and collective legal mobilization by women spurs law reform and paves the way toward formal and substantive gender equality"--P. [4] of cover.