Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India. By Narendra Subramanian. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014. 377 pp. $65 paper.

Abstract

Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India. By Narendra Subramanian. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014. 377 pp. $65 paper.Nation and Family points to the need to examine carefully the ways in which conceptions of nation inform attempts to regulate family life through law and policy in plural societies. It addresses questions about plurality of personal laws and the patterns and pace of family law reform in independent India. One of the principal arguments Subramanian makes is that the extent and direction of personal law reform is determined by specific interactions between discourses of nation and community and the coalition-building ambitions of the political elites. In India this resulted in what he describes as modest yet reforms as compared to changes in other multicultural nations such as Turkey, Tunisia, and Indonesia that he surveys in Chapter 2. Subramanian presents an interesting introductory account of the various combinations of conceptions of postcolonial nations, responses to colonial institutions and discourses, desires for both the indigenous and the in several postcolonial nations, and the different forms of multiculturalism and family law these combinations have produced. This broad comparative overview is a significant contribution that serves as an invitation for more in depth comparative research in this field.In chapters that follow Subramanian traces the changes in particular aspects of family law in India, first in law, and then in Muslim and Christian laws. Subramanian argues that reforms in the latter two started late and have been slower, primarily because policy makers, majority of whom were Hindus, regarded culture as being more dynamic. They also failed to recognize the impetus for social change within minority communities and relied instead almost exclusively on Hindu concerns and initiatives in order to understand and reduce the existing inequalities (p. 277). In case of Muslims, there was also a misreading of the community's desire for a distinct personal law as a resistance to any change in the family law, with serious implications for gender equality. Subramanian also sheds light on the ways in which the policy makers' ignorance of the nature of reform the Muslim mobilizers were seeking coupled with their reliance on stereotypes of Christian communities being more open to modern values led to the different approaches to Muslim and Christian personal law reforms in the country, which in turn resulted in more marginalization of Muslims than of Christians.While Nation and Family focuses primarily on the role of policy makers in legal reform, it also offers interesting comments on legal elites, especially on the tendency of judges trained in a particular tradition to rely on colonial personal law while interpreting statutes, unlike religious elites who are often committed to reform agendas that are also based on what Subramanian refers to as precolonial traditions (page 37). …