Women Between Community and State:

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to think through the question of women’s position in relation to the state and to religious communities, a position that is invariably played out as a conflict between the exercise of women’s citizenship rights and the claims of the religious communities they belong to. This issue figures in the debates and conflicts around a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) for India, which are among the most vigorous and divisive in the present Indian intellectual and political scene, concerning as they do the desirability or otherwise of instituting such a set of laws to replace the current personal laws, and, if the first, the manner of doing it and the content of such laws. This essay is divided broadly into two parts. In the first I set out the main positions on the UCC, identify the relationships among individual, community, and state on which they are premised, and highlight the feminist interventions made on grounds of gender, citizenship, and rights. The second part of the essay seeks to locate women as “national subjects” in relation to, but also beyond, the state and the religion-based community that the UCC debates invoke, as providing the only two alternative resources and identities for the (gendered) Indian citizen.