Divorce and Democracy: A History of Personal Law in Post-Independence India, S. Saxena

Abstract

Divorce and Democracy: A History of Personal Law in Post-Independence India is a timely (re)telling of the complex story of personal law in post-independence India. Marking legal historian Saumya Saxena’s debut, the book traverses numerous themes of historical and continued relevance to the fabric of India’s democracy. These include—but are not limited to—the relationship between law and religion, the ‘content’ and ‘vocabulary’ of India’s democracy, gender, and minority rights. In the process, Saxena animates the plurality of actors and acts that have impacted the course of the story of personal law and challenges the centrality often accorded to the state in such discourses. Saxena’s inquiry unfolds across six chapters that are prefaced by an introduction and succeeded by a conclusion styled as a postscript. The chapters are organized chronologically, mapping the transformative events and interactions over roughly a decade each from 1946 onwards. Each chapter delves into one major archive with the intention of bringing them into conversation with one another.1 Throughout, ‘the legal archive remains an “optic” rather than the law’s own gaze, where legal spaces merely provide multiple avenues of storytelling’.2