A Land of One’s Own : Women and Land Rights in Literature and Society [1 ed.] 9781443875134, 9781443870092

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A Land of One’s Own

A Land of One’s Own Women and Land Rights in Literature and Society By

Lata Marina Varghese

A Land of One’s Own: Women and Land Rights in Literature and Society By Lata Marina Varghese This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Lata Marina Varghese All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7009-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7009-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Women and Land Rights in Indian Literature Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 Women and Land Rights in Indian Society Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 Women’s Land Rights in Kerala: A Case Study of Pathanamthitta District Conclusion ................................................................................................. 73 Bibliography .............................................................................................. 81

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to place on record my sincere gratitude to the University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi, India for granting me this project, to Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd, UK for accepting the manuscript for publication, to my family, friends, and well-wishers for their constant support and encouragement. Last but not the least, to Dr. Bina Agarwal and Dr. Nitya Rao for their research work on Women’s Land Rights which I have quoted extensively and to all other writers whose research findings have provided the basic material for my own research on women’s land rights. Dr. Lata Marina Varghese

PREFACE

Land, as one of the scarcest of natural resources, has always been a bone of contention since time immemorial. Nothing in human history has evoked such fierce passion or horrible bloodshed than disagreement over access to land resources. Land has always been a crucial social asset in the formation of cultural identity as it is related to male power, prestige and economic security. Women throughout the world are rarely landowners. Although 50% of the world population are women, less than 10% own land or have land rights. In a predominantly male society that makes up this world, women have always been discriminated against. The deep rooted gender- biases are clearly reflected in women’s lack of access to and control over land. So to the oft asked question as to why women need independent rights to land? The answer is quite simple. Just like men, the status of women in all societies is directly linked to their right to access, ownership and control of land. Land ownership has a direct impact on the relations between men and women, which is reflected in a range of practices, including division of labour roles, and other resources between men and women. Traditionally, rural women have been responsible for half of the world’s food production and their specialized knowledge about genetic resources for food and agriculture makes them essential custodians of agro-biodiversity but now due to patriarchal gender discrimination, women’s productive role in the food chain has been displaced. This has led to women’s increased marginalization with their contribution to the economy and society remaining either ignored or mostly underpaid or largely unpaid. Women’s rights to land are therefore a critical factor in increasing their social status, economic well-being and empowerment. Indian women, except in certain matrilineal communities, have had virtually no customary rights to land due to the various personal laws that govern them although attempts have now been undertaken to make land tenure laws more gender-equal. However the unpalatable truth is that the incorporation of such noble intentions into public policy in India has been extremely slow and even today it remains just an issue of marginal concern. In fact women’s land-related concerns are a much neglected area not just in governmental and non-governmental institutions but also in academic scholarship. This book brings within its purview the issues of women’s land rights within the Indian context. Not only does the book provide a framework

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from where an analysis of women’s land rights in literature and society can be assessed but it also provides the critical perspectives of various writers who have previously conducted research on this particular topic. In addition insights gleaned from international and national legal documents regarding human rights and women’s land rights, in particular have been incorporated to facilitate a better understanding of the topic.

INTRODUCTION

Human beings are entitled to certain basic and ‘natural’ rights that define a meaningful existence. Human rights are the basic standards of equity and justice without which people cannot live in dignity. Equal dignity of all persons is the central tenet of human rights. Human rights can thus be defined as the inalienable and indivisible rights held by all human beings, and yet ironically their abuse is a daily occurrence. The notion of ‘natural’ rights was propounded in the seventeenth century by the philosopher John Locke, who urged that certain rights are ‘natural’ to individuals as human beings, having existed even in the ‘state of nature’ before the development of societies and the emergence of the state (Weston 2000). As natural rights are intrinsic and independent of rights provided by the state, it cannot take them away. The American independence movement of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 were inspired by the ideal of ‘natural’ rights, and both movements sought to challenge governments that curtailed the natural rights of people. It was during the French Revolution in 1789 that natural rights were elevated to the status of legal rights with the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, which defined the ‘natural and imprescriptible rights of man’ as “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression” (Article 2, Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789). This declaration of natural rights was deployed in several political and social movements through the nineteenth century. For instance, the suffragette movement was premised on the natural equality between men and women. Historically, human rights have been classified in terms of three generations, viz, (i) civil and political rights, (ii) economic, social and cultural rights, and (iii) solidarity rights. The evolution of human rights or civil rights, according to T. H. Marshall, comprises three stages: first, the emergence of civil rights such as liberty and freedom of speech; second, the arrival of political rights with active involvement in the political process; and third, the development of new social and economic rights such as welfare, housing and education. Although human rights violations can and do take place in any sphere, through any medium, the discourse on human rights is articulated primarily through the state, the machinery that exists to protect them. Rights are meaningful in the context of a state that

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Introduction

recognizes them, and education about human rights is an empowering process. The League of Nations having failed in enforcing and safeguarding international peace and security, it was only in the aftermath of the gruesome Second World War that the need to acknowledge and safeguard human rights was articulated at the global level in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. One of the main goals of the United Nations is to promote and encourage respect for human rights. Apart from detailing the rights and freedom of individuals for the first time, it was the first international acknowledgement of the ‘inherent dignity and of equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family and the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’ (Para 1 of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The UDHR was premised on the principle of universality and nondiscrimination. Article 1 states that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’, without ‘distinction of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’ (Article 2 UDHR). But as it was in the form of a Declaration it was not binding on its signatories. However, upon its adoption, the Commission on Human Rights (which was appointed by the Economic and Social Council of the UN) began to formulate a treaty that would be binding on states, so as to effectively realize the rights recognized by the UDHR. In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which together formed the International Bill of Human Rights. This bill laid the foundation for the formulation and adoption of human rights treaties and incorporated concerns relating to equality, nondiscrimination, education, health, social security, administration of justice, social development, violence against women, and the status of refugees and minorities. Women’s human rights are a revolutionary notion. This radical reclamation of humanity and the corollary insistence that women’s rights are human rights have profound transformative potential (Yogish, 2005: 65). A woman’s human rights framework equips women with a way to define, analyze, and articulate their experiences of violence, degradation and marginality. During the UN Decade for Women (1976-85), apart from establishing universal standards to promote and protect women’s rights, the United Nations held four international conferences on women—at Mexico city in 1975, at Copenhagen in 1980, at Nairobi in 1985 and in Beijing in 1995—which set new bench-marks for the advancement of

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women and the achievement of gender equality, although differences of opinion were expressed in discussions on issues like inheritance rights, the role of culture and religion, and the role of the family (Moghadam 1996). The equality of rights is also explicitly asserted in the three articles of the UN Charter. The Charter’s provisions on women’s equality offer a clear and compelling basis for asserting advancement of the political and legal status of women. But despite the regard for the principle of nondiscrimination being embedded within the UDHR, ICCPR, ICESCR, and other human rights agencies, women are not treated equally at the global level. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was established in 1976 to redress inequalities. But even CEDAW acknowledges that discrimination against women violates the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity, and is an obstacle to the participation of women on equal terms with men, in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries. This, in turn, affects the development of family and society as a whole. But some nations have expressed reservations against certain provisions of the CEDAW, with several Islamic nations objecting to it on the grounds that it may conflict with the Islamic Shariah system of law. Human rights have evolved and developed as a reaction to oppressive institutions, politics, and practices. Based on Aristotle’s notion that ‘equals are entitled to equal things’, and that formal equality is a principle of equal treatment, the Indian Constitution guarantees and posits formal equality under Articles 14, 15, and 16. Although Article 15(1) of the Indian Constitution prohibits all forms of discrimination, under Article 15 (3) power is, however, vested in the State to make special provisions for women and children. The Indian Constitution exemplifies the ‘common understanding’ of basic human rights as it incorporates the principles outlined in UDHR in the form of Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles of State policy. The National Human Rights Commission of India (NHRC) established under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, together with the State Human Rights Commission, inquires into, and investigates complaints of, human violations. Owing to the overwhelming patriarchal structure of Indian Society, women have been relegated to a secondary status and have been subject to various legal and social discriminations. The framers of the Constitution, having recognized the need to remove such inequities made special provision to redress the same. The National Commission for Women (NCW) has thus been established under the National Commission for Women Act in 1990. The NCW as a statutorily constituted body is empowered to consider matters relating to the deprivation of women’s rights. It also conducts studies and

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Introduction

investigations into problems arising out of discrimination and atrocities against women and recommends strategies for their removal. The first concerted assertion of the rights of women came in the form of the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, when under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton women demanded equal rights. Thereafter, the liberal feminist movement secured the right to vote, the right to access educational institutions, the right to secure employment, and the right to equal pay for equal work, amongst many other rights. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of 1993 (which was the outcome of the World Conference on Human Rights) promoted women’s rights as human rights. It emphasized that the human rights of women and girls were an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. However, in India, within the family, gender constructs create gender roles, which are legitimized by legislation that impinges on equality amongst men and women leading to gender discrimination. Further, personal laws provided different sets of rights and obligations, which has led to discrimination amongst persons belonging to different religions, thereby violating the right to equality enshrined in Articles 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution. Personal laws have often been exploited to the disadvantage of women. However, the Uniform Family Code (UFC) will, it is hoped, incorporate the positive aspects of all personal laws and take into account the anomalies within the existing laws. On the whole, the United Nations and the Constitution of India have made great efforts in promoting women’s equality of rights by setting standards, norms and formulating strategies. Nevertheless, the vast arrays of standards, strategies and declarations have not made much difference to the vast majority of women. But with the shifting of the global focus from the political disputes of the rich and advanced industrialized nations to the poor, less-developed, and developing countries, questions have been raised on the relationship between poverty and oppression and of the violation of human rights of disadvantaged sections of the society, including women. Coincidently, women represent a large proportion of the world’s total poor, and the majority are from the developing nations. Most of the world’s estimated 1.4 billion poorest people are still rural. Yet the majority lack ownership (or any secure rights) to the land that is their principal source of livelihood. Land empowers. Its significance lies in its self-determination, identity and economic security of an individual. Land rights are civil rights of fundamental importance to an individual, and it does not merely mean ownership rights. Rights are claims that are legally and socially recognized and enforceable by an external legitimized authority. Rights in land can be in the form of ownership or usufruct (that

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is, rights of use), associated with different degrees of freedom to lease out, mortgage, bequeath or sell. Land rights also stem from inheritance of an individual or joint family basis, from community membership, from transfer by the state, or from tenancy arrangements, purchase, and so on (Agarwal 19). In India, agriculture is the main source of livelihood, and land is an essential element of identity. Collective rights and community control are seen as hallmarks of this identity, guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution of India. In principle, collective rights can promote gender equality by guaranteeing all members of the community access to land. In practice, however, it does not necessarily work in this way, as landed property has historically been linked with male identity. Therefore, women’s demands for land are seen by many men as disrupting the struggle to establish a collective identity and gain collective rights (Rao 10). Hence, the discourse of ‘community’ is often used to deny women access to land as ‘individuals’. Further, men’s well-being is primarily seen to depend on their ability to perform the ‘provider’ role. But with the changing economic and policy environment, their inability to do so is creating a crisis of masculinities (Chant 2000). The assertion by women of their rights is a demand for recognition, but it is construed as a challenge to male authority that needs to be controlled. Men, therefore, struggle to reshape their identities and masculinities by engaging in aggressive behaviour to ensure discipline (Osella et al. 2004). Women who publicly assert their rights to land are branded as ‘dain’ (witch) in North India, especially in Bihar and West Bengal, and are harassed and killed (Mishra 2003). Hence, in the struggle for land rights it is becoming increasingly clear that it is critical for women to win land rights for establishing more equal gender relations, both within and outside the house. However, Bina Agarwal in her analysis opines that policy-makers and NGOs (including women’s) groups, in India as well as in most of South Asia, seem more preoccupied with employment as the indicator of women’s economic status, to the neglect of land and property rights. India has a long history of land struggles, especially in South India during the 1940s and 1950s, like the Telengana struggle of 1946-51, the Thanjavur movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and, of course, the Tehbhaga movement in Bengal. The first land struggle in India to explicitly take up the issue of women’s rights to land was led by the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini in Bodhgaya district in Bihar in 1979. Nevertheless, when the lands were finally distributed, the titles of land were in the names of men, with the exception of some widows. The women who had participated in the struggle felt it was unjust and persisted

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Introduction

with their claims, leading ultimately to their getting the titles, countering multiple tiers of resistance, from the family, and the community, including male activists, the state and the bureaucracy in the process (Manimala 1984). Another successful land struggle was from Maharashtra in 1980, where male farmers were persuaded to voluntarily transfer a piece of their land to their wife’s name (Kishwar 1997). In 2002 Janu, a tribal woman leader of Waynad district of Kerala had exposed patriarchal biases in the land reforms implemented in Kerala. In Gujarat, women’s organizations had formed a coalition to pressure the state to ensure land rights for women. The understanding of inequality, particularly gender inequality, and the consequent avenues for solidarity to negotiate one’s identity, are not uniform across societies, or even within societies. Women are not a homogenous group. Women’s identities are negotiated at different levels within the household and in the community, as well as by the bureaucracy and political leaders. For men, land is clearly prized for the status it gives, the sense of identity and rootedness, and membership in the village decision-making bodies, rather than its economic value alone. Women’s contribution to the economy or society at large remains unrecognized, largely underpaid, and mostly unpaid, and they have little access to government-provided opportunities, formal-sector employment and social security. Therefore, women’s struggles around land represent their struggle to gain social identity as complete beings and not just homemakers. Poor women are often ill treated everywhere-in the family, in the community and in society. Rural women have little or no control over resources or on the income earned for the family. For most women, especially in the rural context, land is their only source of livelihood. Unfortunately, most women waive their rights to the land in favour of their brothers. Dependent on male protection, they bargain away their right to land in exchange for the promise of kin support in times of distress. The specificity of the manifestation of gender relations in historically and culturally contextualized forms helps clarify why women might not all have similar interests in matters of land. It is also equally important to recognize that women’s claims to land have always been different from those of men. So while some women support women’s rights as central to their economic survival, others oppose them, depending on their perceptions of what they have to gain or lose. Although in India there is considerable legislation to support women’s rights, with Articles 14, 15 and 16 making equality before the law a Fundamental Right of every citizen of the country, the claims for equality can be conflicting, as the claims of some would be recognized over others, in a context of limited

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resources. Research, nevertheless, shows that women’s capacity to access and use land is important for economic growth and for poverty reduction. Worldwide, women’s land rights are increasingly being put forth as a means to promote development by empowering women, increasing productivity, and improving welfare. However, little empirical research has evaluated these claims. Women who own land are significantly more likely to have the final say in household decisions, which is a measure of their empowerment. When women have access and secure rights to land, they are better able to improve the lives of their families and themselves. But women in many poor countries do not have access to land or lack secure property rights to the land they do possess. This dearth makes women even more vulnerable to poverty. Feminist analysis has shown female poverty is in many ways distinct from male poverty. Poverty is indeed a gendered experience (Jackson 1998), often leading to a phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘feminization of poverty’. Women living in poverty are often denied access to critical resources such as credit, land and inheritance. The World Health Organization has noted that women continue to lag behind men in control over essential resources, including land. Eighty-six per cent of female workers in rural India are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. But rural women’s lack of land rights limits their access to the other livelihood assets that flow from the control of land, and women without land as collateral have often also been excluded from institutional credit. Land rights confer direct economic benefits as a source of income, status, nutrition, and collateral for credit. Assets and income in the hands of women results in higher calorific intake and better nutrition for the household than when they are in the hands of men. So improving women’s land rights makes a powerful contribution to household food security. Further, secure land rights provide women with greater incentives to adopt sustainable farming practices and invest in their land. However, women may not fully participate in these benefits as members of a household if they do not share formal rights to land. Control over land and property can have multiple meanings, such as the ability to decide how the land and resources are used and disposed of, and whether it can be leased out, mortgaged, bequeathed, sold, etc. However, legal ownership does not necessarily carry with it the right to control. Gender equality in land rights is thus both a livelihood objective in itself and a powerful means of eradicating poverty. According to Article 17 of the Universal Declaration, a) everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others, and b) no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of property. However, women, who

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Introduction

perform two-thirds of the world’s work, earn only one-tenth of all income and own less than one-tenth of the world’s property. Almost seventy per cent of the world’s people living in poverty are women. So women remain economically disadvantaged, which makes them vulnerable to violence. In contemporary society, female poverty has assumed importance as femaleheaded households are on the increase due to: 1) rises in the number of unmarried women, divorcees and widows; 2) separation; 3) male migration; 4) lower calorie intake and other deprivations when compared with men; and 5) declining trends in employment for women in agriculture and village industries. Besides these, cultural and social restrictions create an economic dependence on men which is reinforced by difficulties women encounter in inheriting property. Women’s land rights, however, intersect with other problems such as discriminatory inheritance patterns, agriculture and development issues, gender-based violence, the appropriation and privatization of communal and indigenous lands, as well as gendered control over economic resources and the right to work. Consequently, the interdependence of women’s human rights highlights the importance of women being able to claim their rights to land, in order to lessen the threat of discrimination, different forms of violence, denial of political participation, and other violations of their economic human rights. The debilitating effect of women’s unequal rights to access and control of rural land has received very little recognition, although women’s contribution to the family (both economic and social) as well as to a nation’s economy has been well documented. Women’s empowerment, equal rights for men and women, and an equal share of property, etc., are some of the issues discussed every day, but the stark reality is that these issues are still “unresolved”. Not much has actually been done to create equality between the male and female gender. “Why do women need to own land?” is one of the first questions often asked. Most landless rural women can answer this question very simply: “Owning land would give me security in case my husband leaves me or in case I am widowed.” Many women live in landless or near-landless households, and even when a woman’s family owns land, she rarely personally owns any part of the land. Globally, women’s land rights are becoming an area of increasing urgency and concern as discrimination against women over land, property and inheritance rights continues to keep them in a subordinate position, even today. Lack of access to, and control over, land and property constitutes a violation of human rights and contributes significantly to women’s increasing poverty. To put it another way, access and control

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together lay the foundation for women’s empowerment, and international human rights instruments have time and again reiterated their commitment to women’s empowerment by binding the State Parties to ensure women of their basic right to life, survival and livelihood. However, ensuring such a right is clearly a matter of law and policy. This book traces the disjuncture between men and women’s formal equality before the law in India, an issue particularly well illuminated by the gap between women’s land rights and the actual ownership of land. The land rights of women in this book are taken in their broadest sense to mean land as property and not just agricultural land, although for rural women that is the main source of livelihood. The structure of the book comprises three chapters, apart from the Introduction and Conclusion. x The Introduction traces the origins of human rights and shows how women’s land rights have been dealt with at the International, National and State level; x Chapter One, ‘Women and Land Rights in Indian Literature’, analyses how novelists of Indian English Fiction, especially women novelists, have dealt with the issue of women and land rights in their works; x Chapter Two, ‘Women and Land Rights in Indian Society’, presents how Indian society, which is mainly patriarchal, has dealt with the issue of women’s land rights and how personal laws also discriminate against Indian women, especially in their right to land ownership; x Chapter Three, ‘Women and Land Rights in Kerala: A Case Study of Pathanamthitta District’, deals with the issue of Women’s land rights in Kerala, which once followed the matrilineal system of inheritance but has now, especially after colonization, become more patriarchal in its outlook and discriminates against women in their right to own land. A case study of Pathanamthitta District has been made to prove this point; x The Conclusion sums up the findings of the task undertaken.

Objective of the study x To trace the origins of women’s land rights and to evaluate how policies of the government regarding land, land usage and ownership of land by women have been dealt with at the international, national and state level; x To examine how Indian English literature, especially fiction, has dealt with the question of women’s land rights;

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Introduction

x To understand how Indian society has dealt with the problem of women’s land rights; x To probe how the issue of women’s land right has been dealt with in the state of Kerala.

Research Methodology The methodology is in general descriptive, although Chapter One and Chapter Three are mainly analytical. Data collected through structured questionnaires and interviews have been used for the case study to highlight the issue of women’s land rights.

CHAPTER ONE WOMEN AND LAND RIGHTS IN INDIAN LITERATURE

“Does one man dare to deprive another of his birthright to God’s pure air which nourishes his body? How then shall a man dare to deprive a human soul of its immemorial inheritance of liberty and life? And yet my friends, man has dared in the case of Indian women. That is why you men of India are today what you are: because your fathers, in depriving your mothers of that immemorial birthright, have robbed you, their sons of your just inheritance. Therefore I charge you restore to your women their ancient rights…” (Sarojini Naidu).

Women’s human rights include their right to land and property, which is a critical factor in determining their social status, economic well-being and empowerment. Sarojini Naidu, at the historic Calcutta Session of the Indian Social Conference of 1906, very ingeniously linked the suppression of women’s rights in India with the loss of the country’s freedom. Land is a livelihood-sustaining asset. Millions of women worldwide depend solely on land for a livelihood, especially in rural agrarian economies where arable land is the most valued form of property and productive resource. Traditionally, it has been the basis of political power and social status, and for a significant majority of rural households it is the single most important source of security against poverty. For many, it even provides a sense of identity and rootedness. But the scarcity of productive land is a major force against women’s rights to own and inherit land. In addition, their right to property is unequal to those of men, and their rights to own, inherit, manage and dispose of land and property are under constant attack from customs, laws and individuals. Irrespective of the economic status of the family, man is the centre, and woman is the marginalized. Therefore, one of the main goals of the United Nations is to promote and encourage respect for human rights and advocate equal rights for both men and women. Studies, however, reveal that few women own arable land, and even fewer effectively control any. The social and economic implications of this are wide-ranging.

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Chapter One

Pre-independence India had a feudal agrarian structure. A small group of large landowners, including absentee landlords, had land rights. The vast majority of cultivators did not have any rights, or had limited rights as tenants or sub-tenants. The poor mostly leased-in land for subsistence. According to the UNICEF report on Gender Equality (2007), women perform 66 per cent of the world’s work, and produce 50 per cent of the food, but earn only 10 per cent of the income and own one per cent of property. In India, 80 per cent of the working women labour in the fields and hence can be seen as major food producers, yet fewer than 10 per cent of them own land. But women rarely speak, and hardly ever perceive the inequalities in the division of labour in agriculture because they are culturally legitimized. Land is a major resource of production, and lack of control over this important resource has constituted a limiting factor to women’s productivity. Besides, women’s lack of bargaining power within the household also curtails their economic independence. In a predominantly male-dominated Indian society, where gender-biases are deep-rooted, women have always been discriminated against. This discrimination is reflected in women’s lack of access to, and control over land, and property in particular. Generally, it is women who suffer more owing to land deprivation and discriminatory cultural practices. In India, since it is not customary for women to own land, their access to land depends on marriage, and to which they retain access as long as they remain in their husband’s household. According to Bina Agarwal, effective and independent land rights for women are important on at least four counts: welfare, efficiency, equality and empowerment (4). But lack of accessibility to land has created increased poverty, frustration, constant disputes and enmity between men and women. Literature is a reflection of life. As such, contemporary literature reflects the problems and malaises of modern life, replete with the phenomenon of migration, displacement, dispossession, alienation, fragmentation, stress, depression and neurosis. Fiction, being the most characteristic form of literary expression today, has acquired a prestigious position in Indian English literature. It has become a powerful instrument in the hands of women writers to espouse social concerns and to delve deep into the psyche of Indian woman. Indian women novelists in English have been presenting woman as the centre of concern in their novels. Most women in fiction and in real life have to grapple with conflict situations. The contemporary Indian woman in her march towards emancipation and womanhood has to struggle not only with the insensitivity of a chauvinist Indian society but also with the indoctrination of centuries that has endeavoured to fashion her into its mould of ‘womanhood’. Indian

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womanhood is constituted, ‘invented’, ‘imagined’ and ‘defined’ by a multi-layered accretion of myths to hide the virulent exploitative nature of patriarchy which uses this myth of Indian womanhood to transfix it on an essentialist notion of ‘purity’ to establish a regime of caste, class and gender oppression. But changing social dynamics have brought about an increased awareness among women regarding their socio-economicpolitical and educational rights. Helene Cixous, in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, states that women’s writings encode authentic female experience. The Indian woman, passive or aggressive, traditional or modern, serves to reflect the author’s quest for psychological insight and awareness of social realities. Indian women, in view of their limited freedom and insular mode of life, are mercilessly denied opportunities and are often at a great disadvantage when compared to men. The women writers have certainly brought a strikingly fresh sensibility to Indian English literature through their endeavours to lay bare the oppressive and anti-human values system of society. They subtly indicate that society is often indifferent and vindictive towards women, and have therefore tried to destabilize the social power of male domination in their novels by presenting women’s side of the social world. The focus of this chapter is on the land rights of women in Indian society as reflected through Indian literature, especially in Indian English fiction by women writers. For this purpose I have chosen two novels, Kamala Markanday’s Nectar in the Sieve, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Although many Indian writers have dealt with issues of land, dispossession, hunger and poverty, especially in rural India, none has explicitly referred to women’s land rights. Even Markandaya and Roy have only obliquely referred to it in their novels. Post-Independence Indian English fiction constitutes an important part of world literature today, and women novelists have made significant contributions to it. The novelists of the pre-Independence era were influenced by Gandhian ideology and tried to create a literature of social concerns. Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and Bhabani Bhattacharya dealt with issues of social concern. Mulk Raj Anand, in fact, attacks the caste and class system in India. Through his novels, he upholds the rights of the mine-workers, factory workers, the land labourers and the daily wage earners. All these writers were concerned with the poverty, hunger and exploitation of India’s teeming mass of poor people, and, like Kamala Markandaya, show women and girls suffering from poverty, repression and family restrictions without having any sense of identity or selfawareness. Submissiveness and obedience to male dominance and tradition has been enforced upon them. Even R.K. Narayan in his novel,

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The Dark Room, portrays the plight of an Indian woman through his female character, Savithri, when she says, “I don’t possess anything in this world. What possession can a woman call her own except her body? Everything else that she has is her father’s, her husband’s or her son’s…Didn’t I say a woman owns nothing?” (Italics mine). Post-Independence Indian fiction in English embodies various images of Indian society in terms of its traditional values and practices as well as its changing ethos in the process of its transition from an agrarian to an industrialized and urbanized socio-economic order. Many writers have portrayed the problem of the place of women in society, but few have voiced concern over the denial of even basic human rights of women in a male-dominated patriarchal Indian society. Of late, there has been vigorous development in thinking about women and their role in society. For the majority of women writers their gender has had some effect on their experiences and their perceptions of the world, and this is reflected in the nature of the work they produce. Women have a significant place in Markandaya’s novels. Women novelists in English have reflected, in their writings, a sharp concern with the role and status of Indian women in terms of social and familial power. Kamala Markandaya’s novels embody a profound and sensitive understanding of the feminine and the female in the Indian ethos (Misra 40). Women in her novels fall into two distinct categories: (a) those who acquiesce in their traditional roles and perceive ideal womanhood in terms of being an obedient daughter, a subservient wife, a protective mother and only a marginal participant in decision-making; and (b) those who militate against the constraints of traditional Indian womanhood and attempt to assert social and sexual power in the face of socio-moral resistance. Most of Markandaya’s novels have women narrators. Her novels explore feminine consciousness by assessing Indian womanhood’s confrontation with male reality. Not being a radical feminist her novels are not an outright condemnation of a repressive male-dominated society, neither are they accounts of the victimization of women (Rakhi 102). Kamala Markandaya, unlike other Indian women writers, is chiefly preoccupied with the problems of the tragic encounter between traditional Indian values and cultural practices on the one hand, and the industrial and urban outlook on the other. Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve, a harrowing tale of agrarian bankruptcy vividly captures all the socio-economic factors that affect the lives of peasants in colonial India. It has been applauded at the national and international level for its ‘faithful portrayal of rural India’ (Mehta 298-99). The plight of the tenant farmers in British India, with its total lack of modern infrastructure in the agricultural sector, the farmer’s

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abject poverty, humiliation and a constant fear of being uprooted, the torture inflicted by the landlord and his agents on tenant farmers—all these are vividly portrayed in the novel. The hierarchy of social classes in Indian villages is based on distinctions of caste and financial status in the context of an agrarian society. As B. Kuppuswamy aptly summarizes: Since the village economy is based primarily on agriculture, the ownership of land gives rise to an agrarian class structure. There are the landowners who form the upper class on account of their wealth and proprietorship. There is the middle-class consisting of the tenants who take the land on lease for cultivation from the landlords, and there are the agricultural labourers who are employed on a daily basis by the landlords or the tenants to help them in the cultivation of the land (475-76).

Thus, landowners, farmers and traders constitute the core of the traditional Indian rural community. The landlord in the erstwhile Zamindari system was a rich person who amassed wealth and social power by exploiting the poor, who were denied even basic human rights. The money-lenders were another category that exploited the poor and held an important place in the rural economy. In times of natural calamity such as famine, drought and flood, the poor farmers and workers were forced to borrow money from such money-lenders, who often insisted that the villagers pawned their land and houses which they more often than not never recovered, since they were unable to pay back the loan. The illiterate and downtrodden peasants consider all their hardships and misfortunes as their fate. It is this fatalistic attitude that keeps the marginalized groups like women and the lower classes in India in a subordinate position. The novel is a vivid record of the hungry rural peasantry whose life is afflicted by the existing social institutions and rituals such as child marriage, widowhood, neglect of female children, slavery, landlessness, homelessness, casteism and illiteracy (Misra 2). Markandaya seeks to explore the predicament of the individual in a caste- and class-ridden society subjected to a process of radical change. Nectar in a Sieve is the story of an agrarian couple Nathan and Rukmani. The story is narrated by Rukmani, a peasant woman whose rustic life is shattered by the intrusion of industrialization and the transition that was sweeping all over India in the 1940’s. Her references to her father’s diminishing status at the beginning of the novel set the stage for the economic changes sweeping through India. The brief paragraph about Rukmani’s wedding is packed with sociological commentary on the changing times: “Four dowries are too much for a man to bear”. The youngest daughter of a village headman, Rukmani had dreamt of a grand

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wedding but this was not to be as, with changing times, her father had lost both power and prestige. Her marriage to Nathan, a tenant farmer was a shock, yet her husband’s love and tenderness and their happiness in working together for a good harvest are rewards enough. These moments are precious like nectar, which if put through a sieve can be drained away. Rukmani, though literate, is not free from the prejudices against the girl child. The novel also exposes the traditional attitude of Indians towards a female child right from her birth. Rukmani’s disappointment at the birth of a girl child is typical in India, especially for Indian farmers who need manpower for reaping and harvesting. Her reaction at the sight of the first--born is, “what woman wants a girl for her first-born?” (19). She sheds tears of weakness and disappointment. She supports her husband’s view that a male child is an asset and a girl child is a liability to the family. Like all Indian women who cherish the desire to be the mothers of sons, she is aware of her husband’s desire for a son “to continue his line and walk beside him on the land” (20). So her happiness knows no bounds at the birth of their sons. But ironically the couple cannot lead a happy and prosperous life even after five sons are born to them. Nathan even thinks that educating a girl child is sheer waste of time and money. In India, a daughter becomes a burden to the family because of the dowry system. Rukmani herself is a victim who was given in marriage to a landless labourer because her father was unable to find a better groom for lack of wealth to afford a good dowry. Although they are poor, even a tenant farmer like Nathan has to give a dowry for his daughter’s marriage. So Ira is married at fourteen with a dowry of hundred rupees, the maximum amount her parents could offer. Rukmani is forced to utilize their meagre store of corn which she had saved for hard times. As a result, the entire family had to starve when the crop failed that year due to heavy rain: “It rains so hard, so long and so incessantly…the waters rose and rose and the tender green of the paddy field sank under and was lost” (39). Yet with all its bareness and fertility, the land pulls Rukmani’s soul to itself. Markandaya well documents Rukmani’s attachment to her land, even though she does not own it. Rukmani gives a graphic picture of the farmer’s life of hardships, of fear and of hunger when she says: This is one of the truths of our existence, as those who live by the land know; that sometimes we eat and sometimes we starve. We live by our labours from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact too, is within our experience. In our life there is no margin for misfortune (136).

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They live out this misery with calm acquiescence until the onset of real disaster on the land as well as the rural economy, when a tannery is set up in the neighbourhood. It starts expanding by acquiring cultivable lands of the village and thereby disturbs the fragile rural economy and mars the beauty and peace of the countryside. In addition to this man-made menace, when nature acts as a hostile force in the form of drought and flood resulting in the failure of crops, the tenant farmers are forced into starvation. Heavy storms cause havoc to the poor farmers whose huts, made of flimsy materials and crudely constructed, are reduced to a heap of mud and rubble “…with their owner’s possessions studding them in a kind of pitiless decoration” (45-46), while the tannery, made of cement, stands unaffected. The ruthless landlords and the merciless money-lenders hardly care to come to the rescue of the poor starving farmers, who are forcibly evicted from their beloved land. When all their savings are consumed, Nathan and Rukmani are forced to approach Hanuman, the rice merchant, who heartlessly rejects their plea for rice. So they are forced to approach Biswas, the money-lender, to whom they offer their last two silver coins in exchange for rice. But he too declines to help, demanding more money. The only protesting voice against this social inequality and injustice is raised by the compassionate English missionary doctor, Kennington, who asks Rukmani, “Why do you keep this ghastly silence? Why do you not demand-cry out for help-do something?” (47-48). The villagers cannot cope with the changing social situations brought about by the industrial onslaught which snatches not only their land and property, but also their sons, promising them employment and better financial prospects. But the exodus by the rural people to the urban areas only aggravates their poverty and misery through dislocation and homelessness. The picture of social inequality, the exploitation of the poor and the unhealthy consequences of urbanization has been painted by Venkatamani in Murgan, the Tiller (1927), Mulk Raj Anand in Coolie (1936), and Bhabani Bhattacharya in So Many Hungers (1947), and He Who Rides a Tiger (1954). Kamala Markandaya also presents a realistic study in her novel. She clearly shows that it is not only Nathan’s family which has to undergo severe economic and social afflictions, but also the whole community in the village. So there is a perceptible shift of socio-economic activity from land to factory, and from village to city. The younger generations leave their parental profession of tilling the land for better financial prospects. Thambi explains to his father, “If it were your land, or mine, I would work with you gladly. But what profit to labour for another and get so little in return?” (56).

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In the past, people were entirely dependent on agriculture, but with rapid population growth, agriculture is no longer capable of sustaining an ever-expanding family. As a result, there is growing poverty in Indian villages, with the younger generation showing a distinct tendency to migrate to cities in search of a livelihood. Arjun and Thambi explain to their parents about their decision to go to the Ceylon Tea plantation. Arjun argues with Rukmani, his mother, by stating: “There is nothing for us here, for we have neither the means to buy land nor to rent it-would you have us wasting our youth, chafing against things we cannot change?” (72). Nectar in a Sieve is an epic of Indian life at the grassroots level. In this bleak picture of Indian social life, the darkest zone is the neglected poor Indian women. In the male-dominated Indian society, how can a woman, no matter how hard she works for her family, when she is denied even basic human rights like freedom of speech, articulate or demand land or property rights? In the agricultural sector, which is unorganized labour, the women labourers are paid lower wages than men for the same work, and there is no one to raise their voice against this gross injustice. Further, women are subjected to exploitation and oppression because of their ignorance and innocence. Rukmani’s daughter Ira, who was married to a peasant boy at the age of fourteen, is abandoned by her husband five years after marriage because she fails to beget a child. She is thrown into a life of degradation and debasement when she becomes a prostitute in order to feed her little brother Kuti, as her parents have been thrown off their land and have no means of sustenance. Rukmani, as mother, can neither protest nor object. She quietly endures everything, as she did in her youth, when Nathan has extra-marital relations with Kunti. Rukmini, may seem to be the typical archetypal suffering wife, docile and submissive. But she is literate, as she has been taught to read and write by her father, the village headman, an act that invited the derision of the womenfolk of the village. Rukmani therefore has a progressive approach to life. Although misfortunes stalk her with poverty, and starvation is her lot, it does not dehumanize her. So she is even willing to be displaced from the cherished land: “Yet there was no option but to accept the change…” (100). Her spirit of acceptance and endurance helps her to put up with all kinds of adversity. Even though Rukmani mainly remains passive through all her hardships and suffering, she develops a spirit of rebellion when the peasants and rural folk are deprived of their traditional means of income. Rukmani is aware of the stark reality: “To those who live by the land there must always come times of hardship, of fear and of hunger, even as there are years of plenty” (136). The village dealer Biswas’s inhuman treatment and greed offer a realistic picture of rural India. The greedy dealer

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demands an unimaginable price for rice he has hoarded, and the tenant farmers have to pay an exorbitant price for a handful of rice, and thus Rukmani and her family lose everything they own. The cruelty of nature, either in the form of flood or of drought, was a constant threat to the Indian peasants, apart from the greed of hoarders who aggravated the situation, in addition to the unrelenting landlords who demanded the rent from their tenant farmers no matter whether there was flood or drought. Dues had to be paid to keep the land for cultivation during the next season. It was this hope of a good rain and a good harvest that kept up the farmer’s spirits and sustained their hunger. Cultivation as a way of life received a setback with the advent of industrialization through the setting up of a tannery. It shook up the very fabric of their village and dislocated and uprooted people from their land and traditional livelihood. And it is the binding influence of Rukmani that holds her family together to survive this ordeal. When the young men of the village realize that the land is no longer reliable in providing them with sustenance, they gradually leave behind their hereditary professions and migrate to the towns. The anguish experienced by Rukmani and her family clearly portrays the anguish of the other peasant families at being displaced from their cultural roots. The tannery stands as a great landmark of progress, but for Rukmani, it has a sinister presence, even though she is aware that the real causes of the ruin of her family are inclement weather, crop failure, landlordism, the money-lending system and the defective land tenure system. The disparity between the rich landlords and the poor land-lessees, which was once vertical, now becomes horizontally distributed, where anyone who has a job at the tannery is better off than those involved in the old ways of paddy cultivation and farming. The disintegration of family life, social discrimination and moral chaos is highlighted in the novel. With economic disparity comes moral depravity. The tannery soon becomes a symbol of immorality and exploitation. Ira, Rukmani’s daughter who was returned home by her husband because of her barrenness, took to prostitution in order to feed her dying brother. The irony is that in their abject poverty it is the daughter who helps the family financially. In the traditional Indian society, the moral depravity of the male is never questioned, whereas women always submit themselves to the desires and pleasures of men. Nathan’s extramarital relationship is silently endured by Rukmani for the sake of a peaceful marital life. Even though portrayed as an ideal housewife, Rukmani rises against the social forces confronting her, although she can in no way prevent the outcome. Rukmani opposed this invasion of her

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family life and yet she too had to reconcile to it when two of her sons, Arjuna and Thampy joined the tannery. She was made to realize the hard fact that land was not enough to sustain them: “Not a month went by but somebody’s land was swallowed up…” (47). The last blow to Rukmani from the tannery comes when the land Nathan rents from the landlord is taken by the tannery for further expansion. Rukmani and Nathan were part of the land that they cultivated. And so when they are parted from the land that they cultivated, their souls get uprooted. Displacement causes a crisis of identity, and the uprooted persons suffer from this crisis. Rukmani and Nathan migrate to the town and have to face hardships, uprootedness, insecurity and loss of identity. This eventually drives them back to their village, although Nathan dies on the way back. The life of an average Indian peasant woman is thus succinctly conveyed by Markandaya through “dense data, understatements and monosyllabic words” (Parameswaran 58). The patriarchal system that is entrenched all over the world, barring certain exceptions, has established norms for women over the centuries for controlling the behaviour pattern of females. In her book, Sexual Politics, Kate Millet presents a framework within which the patriarchal family operates whereby one group of persons is controlled by another in a relationship of dominance and subordinance. The role, status or position of a woman in a family is clearly subordinate to that of a man, and in a patriarchal system women are even denied an identity of their own. As Shouri Daniel states: “…she has no shape or form. She is everything or nothing. She is fluid. Pour her into any mould and she takes it…” (12). As she is a void, she becomes a being only in so far as she can be regarded as an object in relation to the man, who is of course the subject. Indian women have been traditionally portrayed as the paragon of resignation and patient suffering. Binodini, in Tagore’s Chokerbali (1903), is perhaps the first Indian woman who rebels against social norms by claiming an identity of her own at a time when widows were socially ostracized. She is portrayed as a bold, unconventional character who loves a married man, though ultimately she submits herself to the social code of self-denial and self-sacrifice. In free India, women enjoy political rights and rights to education and jobs. Arundhati Roy, as a post-Independence Indian writer, discusses this change. Her novel, The God of Small Things, unfolds the problems besetting women in a male-dominated society. The backdrop to the novel is the post-Independence Kerala of the 1960’s, but the issues it explores are the social attitudes of Indian society. The novel highlights women’s status in society—especially a divorced daughter’s rights in her paternal home where she has no locus standi and against

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which Mary Roy, Arundhati’s mother, fought, “winning a landmark Supreme Court verdict that granted Christian women in Kerala the right to their parents’ property”. The inequality and discrimination against women in India is not merely culturally-specific, but disparity between men and women is the result of a complex operation of economic, political, social and other factors. In spite of the significant change in women’s position in society in the postIndependence era, she is still not totally emancipated. All the power structures and practices consolidate women’s subordinate position. Maitreyi Mukhopadhyay says that “It should be emphasized that the poor status of women, their oppression and exploitation, cannot be examined as an isolated problem in Indian Society. Although the status of women constitutes a problem in most societies… In India, the relative inferiority and superiority of various roles is much more clearly defined. The inequality and subordination of women is an instrument or function of the social structure” (Desai 82). The novel highlights the gender bias, discrimination, and violence inflicted on women and the double standards of morality in society. The novel relates the story of a Syrian Christian family—the Ipes of Ayemenem—who are rich and have landed property, a rubber estate and a factory called Paradise Pickles and Preserves at Ayemenam in Kerala. The novel describes the lives of three generations of women, Mammachi, Ammu and Rahel. Ammu, the central character, is of the second generation, but the dominant narrating voice is that of her daughter Rahel. Like Rukmani in Nectar in a Sieve, Ammu’s life is a saga of suffering. She does not, however, have the fortitude of Rukmani, and she refuses to accept passivity and subordination as a woman’s lot. Ammu represents the status and predicament of women in a maledominated society. As a daughter, she had an early taste of a male chauvinist’s brutality and hypocrisy through her own father, a renowned entomologist. Being forced to live with this “cold, calculating cruelty” (180), she develops “a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big” (181-182). But Ammu and her children have no power because of their dependent status. The position of Mammachi and Baby Kochamma is not much better either, even though they victimize Ammu, they themselves are victims of an oppressive patriarchal system. The structure of the novel portrays the dialectics of the dominance by those at the top of the social ladder, and defiance and resistance by those at the margins. Ammu is ignored and neglected by her parents: “Her eighteenth birthday came and went. Unnoticed, or at least unremarked

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upon, by her parents. Ammu grew desperate. All day she dreamed of escaping from Ayemenem and the clutches of her ill-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother” (38-39). Ammu, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a respectable Syrian Christian family, would thus probably have been forced to remain unmarried for want of an adequate dowry. She finished her school education the year her father had retired from his job in Delhi and settled at Ayemenem. Ammu is a victim of male-bias. Pappachi, despite being an Imperial entomologist, felt it was a waste of money to educate a girl. He insisted that “college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl” (38). Chacko, the only son of Pappachi and Mammachi is sent to London for higher studies while Ammu, their daughter, is denied an opportunity for higher education. (This can be contrasted with Baby Kochamma’s being allowed to have an education by her father, since her ‘reputation’ made it impossible for her to have any decent offer of marriage, which makes very clear society’s attitude towards the education of girls—a girl can be given education only if she cannot be given in marriage. Marriage, in the eye of the society, is the summum bonum of a women’s life). Ammu having no other way to escape “the clutches of her ill-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother” (39), and with no other alternative except to wait for an offer of marriage, meanwhile had to help her mother with housework and become domesticated. Virginia Woolf sees domestic life as almost social without any privacy for women. “The son of the house may be granted freedom to develop his mind, he may have a room of his own, but the daughter is expected to be at everyone’s beck and call...” (Marder 34-35). The only escape from the oppressive atmosphere for Ammu was through marriage. Simone de Beauvoir remarks that, “there is a unanimous agreement that getting a husband—or in some cases a ‘protector’—is for her (woman) the most important of undertakings…she will free herself from parental home… [and] open up her future not by active conquest but by delivering herself up, passive and docile, into the hands of a new master…” (352). But when no suitable marriage proposal came, Ammu began to grow desperate and “hatched several little plans. Eventually, one worked. Pappachi agreed to let her spend the summer with a distant aunt who lived in Calcutta” (38-39). It is there she meets a young man who proposes to her five days after they had met. Ammu accepts the proposal not because she fell in love with him but because, in a fit of desperation, “she thought that anything, anyone at all would be better than returning to Ayemenem” (39). Roy astutely presents the social predicament of women in India. Life offers little choice for most women. Ammu marries this little-known

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Bengali only to discover a full-blown alcoholic and an outrageous liar who is ready to barter his wife to his English boss in order to save his job. Repelled by his drunken violence and total lack of responsibility for his wife and children, and when she could no longer endure the physical and mental torture, Ammu divorces him and returns, unwelcomed, to her parents’ home in Ayemenem, to everything she had fled from, amidst the “ whining mewl of local disapproval”(34). Among Syrian Christians, a woman has no right to parent’s property. At twenty-seven, Ammu is forced to acknowledge that “for her, life has been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong man” (38). Ammu had no “Locust Stand I” (159) in her parents’ house, where she and her children had to live on sufferance. Her brother Chacko, a Rhodes Scholar and a self-proclaimed Marxist with a feudal libido who flirts outrageously with the untouchable female workers in his pickle factory, regards Ammu and her children as “millstones around his neck” (85). Knowing that she was “already damned” and frustrated by the injustice and neglect of her family and by the hypocrisy of the patriarchal society, Ammu turns into a rebel. At her home and in her family and society, Ammu becomes virtually “untouchable”. The attitude of the patriarchal society is reflected in the views of Baby Kochamma who “subscribed wholeheartedly to the commonly held view that a married daughter had no position in her parents’ home. As for a divorced daughter-according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from a intercommunity love marriage-Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject” (45-46). It is at this time that Velutha, a new-generation, self-asserting untouchable carpenter employed by Ammu’s family, returns to Ayemenem. Velutha is a Paravan, a community of untouchables in Kerala that has been subjected to inhuman cruelty, indignity and exploitation through the ages. Ammu discovers a kindred soul in him. She likes the “living breathing anger” that he houses under his cloak of cheerfulness, against the smug, ordered world she herself rages against (176). Ammu finds herself drawn to him. But the collective hatred of society explodes one day when Velutha transgresses its laws and crosses into the forbidden touchable territory by having an affair with Ammu. The lovers are forced to pay a heavy price for their indiscretion. Velutha is arrested and tortured to death on a false charge. As soon as Ammu comes to know about it, she rushes to the police station to tell the truth, but the treatment that she receives at the hands of the Inspector shows the pitiable condition of .

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women in society, particularly when a woman is a divorcee and has loved an untouchable. The author drops the hint that the police officer knows that he can freely insult this woman without any fear or compunction, for he has the sanction of society. So, he “stared at Ammu’s breasts” as he spoke: He said that “…Kottayam Police didn’t take statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children… Then he tapped her breast with his baton. Gently. Tap tap. As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing to the ones that he wanted packed and delivered” (8). The officer represents society’s attitude to a woman who has dared to love outside the rules of “Love Laws”. And Chacko, her brother, had already threatened her with all the authority of a patriarch in his own house: “Get out of my house before I break every bone in your body” (255). So, having no “Locusts Stand I” anywhere, she has to leave, and dies sick and alone in a hotel, “in the strange bed in the strange room in the strange town” (161), where she has gone for a job interview, her last frantic effort to make a living in her struggle for survival mainly for the sake of her children. She dies at the age of thirty-one. “Not old. Not young. But a viable, die-able age” (161). Ammu had been humiliated and cornered by her father, ill-treated and betrayed by her husband, insulted by the police and rendered destitute by her brother whose contempt for his sister was so deep that he did not even care to show the minimum decency of providing decent shroud for his dead sister but “had her wrapped in a dirty bedsheet” (162). Each of these men voiced the patriarchal ideology which commanded that she should have no right anywhere—as daughter, wife, sister, or even as a citizen. The novel is a scathing criticism of gender discrimination. Chacko and Ammu have failed marriages but society treats them differently. The label ‘divorcee’ does not affect Chacko’s position in society. Interestingly, his sexual-biological need is justified by both Mammachi and Baby Kochamma: “She was aware of his libertine relationships with women in the factory but had ceased to be hurt by them… He can’t help having a Man’s Needs” (168). Nobody cares about the contradiction between Chacko’s Marxist ideals and his feudal libido. But for Ammu, her divorce proves to be a bane. While Mammachi is quite traditional in her outlook, Ammu and her daughter Rahel are non-conformist. However, Ammu does not reflect the image of obedient submissive ‘good’ woman. In marrying a man of her own choice, whoever that might be, she asserts her right to take decisions regarding her body. Unfortunately it turns out to be a wrong choice. Similarly, when she decides to meet Velutha, it’s her decision. But Ammu always remains dependent upon her parents.

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Further discrimination in law is pointed out by Roy. Both Chacko and Ammu work in the factory but Ammu is always made to feel that she does not belong to it. Whenever Chacko talks of Paradise Pickles he calls it ‘my factory’: “Legally, this was the case because Ammu, as a daughter had no claim to the property. Chacko tells Rahel and Estha that Ammu has no locusts standi. ‘Thanks to our wonderful male chauvinist society,’ Ammu said. Chacko says, ‘What is yours is mine and what is mine is also mine.’” (57) (Italics mine) The revolt of Ammu is against patriarchy, against the calculated torture and hypocrisy of the male-chauvinist society. Mammachi, despite her husband’s frenzied violence, is a submissive wife, unlike her daughter Ammu. She does not retaliate against her husband even once. She fits “properly into the conventional scheme of things”. Pappachi remains an orthodox, jealous husband. The fact that he is seventeen years older than his wife bugs him constantly. Many references in the novel illustrate his manic capabilities and his method of terrorizing his family. Hitting Mammachi with a brass flower vase had been almost a daily occurrence until his son, Chacko, stopped it through a memorable physical intervention. But the incident so hurt Pappachi’s pride that he stopped speaking to his wife till his death. He did not even help his wife in her pickle-making business and pretended to consider her job too low to suit the status of a respectable “high-ranking ex-Government official”(47). What actually bothers him is the sudden attention that Mammachi gets from her flourishing business: “He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting” (47). Working women do not seem to have received much importance in the Ayemenem house. As such, “to some small degree he did succeed in further corroding Ayemenem’s view of working wives” (48). Mammachi accepted Pappachi’s neglect and rejection passively and submissively. In other words, she accepted the female role model imposed on her by society—docile, submissive, ungrudging and unprotesting. She is powerless to change things and she cannot express her resentment. Compared with Mammchi and Ammu, Rahel is to a great extent, an emancipated woman, who as a child from a dysfunctional family, develops a casual attitude towards life and does not suffer from the various restrictions generally imposed by society. Rahel, as a highly educated and modern girl refuses to accept the fate of her mother and grandmother. As a chronicle of orthodox Indian society and its dehumanizing taboos, The God of Small Things is sincere and uncompromising. Roy’s protest stems from her sense of outrage at the slave-like status of women and untouchables in free democratic India. Both Ammu and Velutha are

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victims of an unjust social order. Patriarchy’s tolerance of ‘man’s needs’ reiterated by Mammachi at least six times in the book while providing special door for her son Chacko’s room for the ‘objects of his needs’, fails to bear with her daughter Ammu’s needs. So patriarchy punishes both— the woman who has “defiled generations of breeding” (258), and the Paravan who had dared to defile tradition. Power is dark, insensitive and intolerant, and in a sense the story of Ammu, a subordinate woman, and Velutha, a subaltern man, is not a story of Ayemenam alone. It is the story of almost every Indian village immersed in darkness and nurtured by orthodox social codes and patriarchal values. It records the tale of those who struggle against the winds of caste, class and gender. Roy thus deftly exposes the hypocrisy and irrationalities of patriarchy. Much has been written about social change and the rights of women, but the lot of women has not changed much. ‘Literature is political’, though it maintains the posture of ‘the apolitical’ (Fetterley 492). Embedded within the storyline of the novel are undercurrents of power politics. Roy follows the tradition of female writers of creating ‘submerged meanings’ as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have posited (Dhawan 1999: 42), by intelligently camouflaging the game of power politics behind the pattern of a visibly unchanging society. The females are given ability, but the power to control by authority, politics or money, is generally projected as the prerogative of the males. The God of Small Things enacts the eternal drama of confrontation between the powerful and the powerless, but Roy desists from making a woman’s powerlessness the central crisis. Both men and women are projected as victims or as tyrants, although a woman’s loss of power is treated very sympathetically and there is no obsession with woman’s ineffectual condition in society (Dhawan 1999: 42). The psychological, economic and social problems that play a major role in the novel devastate men and women alike. Through her novel, Roy questions the system of power and attempts to change it through the power embodied in literature. As Kate Millet has pointed out, “… when a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely a need to speak itself aloud. When its working is exposed and questioned it becomes not only subjected to discussion, but even to change” (58). The structure of society presented in the novel is apparently patriarchal, and man is the controller of the sexual, economic and political power. The power of the husband, a compulsive wife beater, is not questioned by Mammachi. For her, patriarchy creates an “enclosure through marriage” (Pratt 37). A desire for equity in marriage accounts for

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the desire for equity in power sharing. Unfortunately, a woman is generally truncated, maimed and enfeebled by the institution of marriage. Pappachi enjoys thrashing his wife either with a brass vase (50) or his “ivory-handled riding crop” (181). As Shulamith Firestone explains, in a patriarchal society men consider women their inferiors and project their own sense of inferiority (Pratt 76). Mammachi’s physical vulnerability and Pappachi’s supremacy are established in a conventional manner, but Mammachi’s dogged determination to continue the activities of the pickle factory suggests her rebellion against total subordination. Mammachi’s entry into the business world, the man’s world forbidden to women, is a clear indication of the power she enjoys. Pappachi’s futile attempts to undermine her image of a loving and dutiful wife by sewing shirt buttons in presence of visitors (48), is a ploy often used by male authority to condemn a woman. Roy points out the inevitability of the situation although Mammachi’s physical abuse is stopped by Chacko’s superior physical power when one day “he twisted his father’s hand” and said, “I never want this to happen again.” (48) He becomes his mother’s saviour in one way, but in another, he joins the team of exploiters when he transfers the ownership of the pickle factory to his name. He turns the venture into a ‘partnership’ and his “mother is informed that she was the sleeping partner” (57). Mammachi, despite her initial hard work is reverted to the status of “economically mute” (Pratt 61). But Mammachi accepts her son’s mismanagement of her factory and estate for he had stood up against his father for her sake. Mammachi, after remaining subjugated to her husband for years, now remains subjugated to her son. Ammu’s powerlessness, on the other hand, is partly inherent and partly circumstantial. She dares to defy her community and marries a man from a different religion and caste. But unfortunately she gets divorced and discarded, although her husband is the villain in this marital discord. Society condones this mistake but it can’t forgive her forbidden sexual relationship with an untouchable, but under similar circumstances Chacko’s sexual exploits are totally overlooked. Mammachi’s discriminatory attitude towards her own daughter shows the gender bias inherent in society. A daughter estranged from her husband is made to feel unwanted whereas a son not only receives a warm welcome but also remains the rightful inheritor of the family fortunes. In Indian culture, a woman is expected to remain totally faithful to a man-alive or dead. Arundhati Roy, therefore, forcefully raised the question of ‘woman’s needs’. Though Ammu pays a severe price to satisfy the demands of her body, she seems to be quite helpless. They knew, she and her children, that there was “nowhere for them to go, they had nothing, no

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future” (338). Thus Mammachi’s and Ammu’s loss of power is indicated very definitely. Ammu is a decentred subject in a patriarchal world. For Mammachi and Ammu, “biology is destiny” (Fetterley 495), but Rahel powerfully rejects the authority of both father and husband. Roy confers some power to man and claims some for woman, thereby short-circuiting gender-based power structures (Dhawan 1999:47). Money power, a powerful force to be reckoned with in this social arrangement, is what to a great extent renders Ammu and her children powerless. Their loss of power is related in a way to their economic poverty. One of the reasons for Baby Kochamma’s revengeful attitude towards Ammu and Velutha is due to her innate “fear of being dispossessed” (70). Since she has little right to the property, the presence of Ammu and her daughter Rahel is a threat to her comfortable existence. She is well aware that all the constraints of her own life can be re-imposed on her by Rahel’s return to Ayemenem. Roy thus categorically states that money generates power. Political power in the novel is directly linked with social power, as in the case of Comrade Pillai who despite his Marxist ideals turns out to be an exploiter of the powerless. Roy pertinently points out that the law of society constructed on the principles of the past has many other manifestations and connotations today with new dimensions being added to it, so that even though attempts are made to empower women, the majority of women worldwide continue to remain powerless with men still being the custodians of power and privilege in society. The women’s movement, though it has not radically changed the lives of women in the patriarchal set-up, has at least given them a certain degree of economic independence today, though the lives of majority of the women still remain subjugated in one form or the other in a patriarchal society. Though The God of Small Things is not written as a feminist text, nevertheless it does deal with feminist issues like denial of property rights, educational rights and equal human status for women. Further, it also deals with women’s issues like wife-beating and scarcity of opportunities (Mammachi, for example, an accomplished violinist, is not allowed to play). Ammu grows up with a distinct awareness regarding injustice meted out to her because of her gender. She is acutely aware of the discrimination against women in general and is determined to create her own space. Unlike her mother Mammachi, she refuses to passively suffer her husband’s physical violence, and divorces him. But owing to lack of education, she is denied economic freedom and is therefore dependent on her parents, and by not having any right to anything whatsoever, she is constantly made to feel dejected and low. Roy’s indignation at the exploitation and subjugation of the weak and powerless, and especially

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women, invests her novel with tremendous power. The novel effectively exposes the socio-political and religious hypocrisy prevalent in postindependence Indian society. Roy implicitly presses for greater social reform in the rigid positioning of women. Indian women writers have artistically challenged and stressed the need for changing the antiquated social laws that dictate human relationships. Roy, through her novel, attempts to sensitize malechauvinist society to the cruelty of its treatment of women and low-caste people, and to register her protest against its dehumanizing taboos and demands justice and respectability for women and the backward class. The concept of women’s human rights has opened the way for women to articulate against the wide-spread discrimination and violence that women world-wide experience every day. A reading of the two novels exemplifies the need for creating awareness of women’s rights as human rights.

CHAPTER TWO WOMEN AND LAND RIGHTS IN INDIAN SOCIETY

“Land for women has to do with survival; for men it has to do with power. Is it any wonder that men will be the first to oppose women’s right to land?”

In 1979, a group of poor women from West Bengal made the following demand to their elected village council: “Please go and ask the government why, when it distributes land, we don’t get a title? ... If my husband throws me out, what is my security?” (Agarwal 2002). This demand clearly underlines women’s recognition that their families alone could not guarantee them economic security. Unlike their brothers, married women in India, especially in north-west India, do not inherit ancestral land. In Maharashtra, rural women divorced or deserted by their husbands are forced to work as agricultural labourers on the farms of their brothers who are substantial landowners. Elsewhere in India there are similar cases of widows who, deprived of their rightful shares by prosperous brothers or brothers-in-law, have been left destitute and forced to seek wage work or even beg for survival. In Bodhgaya (Bihar), in 1979, landless labourer women agitating alongside their husbands for ownership rights to the land they had sown for years, protested against the distribution of titles only to men, noting “… we are part of the struggle so we should also get land”(Manimala 1983:8). All these, and many other instances, highlight rural women’s relationship with land, and the importance they attach to having a land of one’s own. In India, for a significant majority of rural households, arable land (an increasingly scarce resource) is the single most important source of security against poverty. Land defines social status, political power and structures relationships both within and outside the household. Ancestral land usually has a symbolic meaning which purchased land does not have, and for some it has ritual importance. Inheritance systems therefore often have different rules for devolvement of ancestral and self-acquired land. Yet for most women, land rights remain elusive despite the number of

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female-headed households multiplying. Although women have struggled for, and won rights to inherit and control, land, few actually own land, and fewer have effective control over it. Bina Agarwal argues that what a woman needs are independent rights to land, which is the most critical form of property in agrarian economies. For the Indian womanit is an index to her right to economic and social power. But women in India, and worldwide for that matter, are rarely landowners. This is despite their high level of involvement in agricultural production and dependence on agriculture for their livelihoods. In most Indian families, women do not own any property in their own names, nor do they get a share of parental property. According to the Indian Succession Act, 1925, everyone is entitled to equal inheritance. But women continue to have little access to land and property. In fact, some of the laws discriminate against women when it comes to land and property rights. Often the property rights of the Indian woman are determined depending on her religion, and, whether she is married or unmarried, tribal or non-tribal. The various property rights are thus in several ways discriminatory and arbitrary, notwithstanding the constitutional guarantee of equality and fairness. In a country where women continue to be property themselves, the right to land is still seen as insurmountable. The central importance of women’s lack of effective rights to property, especially land, explains their economic dependence. There is substantial evidence that economic resources in the hands of male household members do not benefit female members to an equal degree. Independent ownership of such resources, especially land, is thus of crucial importance in promoting the well-being and empowerment of women. However, from the analysis made by Bina Agarwal, the issue is not just of property ownership, but of property control, for even in matrilineal communities where formal ownership of property (including land) was vested in women, its effective control was often vested in men, as was jural authority. In a rural setup, a woman’s fall-back position (and bargaining strength within the family) in case of a crisis would especially depend on five factors: x x x x x

Private ownership and control over assets, especially arable land; Access to employment and other income-earning means; Access to communal resources such as village commons and forests; Access to traditional external social support systems; and Access to support from the State or from NGOs.

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But in India and in most South Asian countries, a woman’s, and especially a daughter’s, ability to successfully claim a share in parental property (if she is not voluntarily given it) would depend on the following factors: x Existing inheritance laws (legal legitimacy); x The woman’s literacy, including legal literacy (that is, her knowledge of legal rights); x The social legitimacy of her claim, that is, whether the claim is considered a valid one in the community of which the household is a part; x Her access to government officials who administer land-related matters; x Her economic and physical access to legal machinery (lawyers, law courts); and x Her access to economic and social resources for survival outside the support systems provided by contending claimants such as brother or kin. Gender differences in intra-household bargaining power are thus linked to the person’s extra-household bargaining power with the community and the State (Agarwal 66-67). The exclusion of women from the ownership of land had remained on the global agenda, but the issue of land rights for women gained visibility in development discourse at the UN Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1980. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of 1979 included specific clauses on the equal treatment of women in agrarian reform and similar rights for both spouses in the ownership, management and disposition of property. The World Development Report of 2000-1 states, “In most developing countries titles to land are normally vested in men. Since the great majority of the world’s poor people live in agrarian settings, there is a fundamental source of vulnerability for poor women … So women face disadvantages not only in land ownership, but in gaining access to the resources and information that would improve yields…” After India’s independence, agrarian reform and land distribution programmes were initiated in recognition of the fact that land distribution was highly skewed and had increased insecurity for those without land. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, peasant women and grassroots activists had raised the issue of women’s independent land rights within mass-based peasant movements. The Agricultural Policy of India, 2000

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made an explicit link between women’s rights to land and household food security, especially children (Tenth Plan, Section 4, 1.60). A major reason for this shift in policy was the increasing visibility of women’s participation in the agricultural labour force. But with rising populations and growing pressure on land, diversification of livelihood has become essential for survival. So men had moved into non-farm activities or migrated, leaving women to tend the land. In such a context of apparent domination of the rural sector by women, individual tenures in the names of males had become a hindrance to growth, by creating a range of practical difficulties all linked to land-holdings. Prior to colonial rule, the inheritance of property, including land, was governed by local customs. There is indisputable evidence that at least a few regions in India practiced matrilineal and /or bilateral inheritance. These are: x North-east India: the home of three matrilineal tribal communities: the Garos, Khasis, and Lalungs; x South India: the Nayars and Tiyyars of Kerala, the Mappilas of north Kerala and Lakshadweep, the Bants of south Canara (Karnataka), the Phadiyas and Chettis of Wynad district (bordering northern Kerala and Tamil Nadu), and the Nangudi Vellalars of Tamil Nadu, who practiced bilateral inheritance. For tracing Hindu inheritance and marriage practices in ancient times, reference was often made to the detailed textual information provided by Dhramashastras, the ancient legal treatise, and the many commentaries upon it. This formed the reference point for the Mitakshara and Dayabhaga legal doctrines which in turn greatly influenced legal practice in the British period and the formulation of the contemporary Hindu law (the Shastras are said to have been constituted from the smritis by renowned sages, of whom Manu was the most orthodox, and Yajnavalkya the most liberal in granting women rights). The Mitakshara system distinguishes between two types of property—joint family property and separate property. The former consisted principally of ancestral property (that is, property inherited from the father or paternal grandfather), plus any property jointly acquired or that was acquired separately that was merged into the joint property. Under Mitakshara, from the joint family property, women were only entitled to maintenance as incoming wives (including as widows) and as unmarried daughters, who upon marriage were entitled to marriage expenses and associated gifts. In a man’s separate property, however, his widow could inherit a limited estate, but

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only in the absence of sons or grandsons. For a daughter to inherit her father’s estate required the absence of both a male heir and widowed mother. And when she did inherit it, a daughter, like the widow, could receive only a limited estate. The Dayabhaga system differed from the Mitakshara system in some important aspects. A man was deemed absolute owner of all his property, both ancestral and self-acquired, and could dispose of it as he wished. However, unlike Mitakshara, women inherited an interest in all property, irrespective of whether it was ancestral or self-acquired, with first preference given to the widow, then unmarried daughters, and only lastly to married daughters. But in both Mitakshara and Dhayabhaga, Hindu women could inherit immovable property such as land only under highly restrictive circumstances. In colonial and post-colonial times, interventions by the State in the legal and economic spheres and the complex processes of social and cultural changes eroded customary practices. In its wake, the large joint family estates came to be partitioned, and the increasing penetration of market forces brought notable shifts in the techniques of production, social division of labour, and land relations. And with the spreading influence of patriarchal ideology, it was the women who were profoundly affected by these changes. The growing privatization of land, the increasing tendency of parents to favour sons by disinheriting daughters, and the enforcement of restrictive sexual mores, etc., were some of the manifestations of these changes. Besides, the way in which the ceiling laws were implemented had an additional adverse effect on women’s ownership of land. Surplus land above the ceiling was assessed on the combined property of husband and wife, and in many instances it was the wife’s land that was forfeited. Thus changes in laws and the growing scarcity of arable land as a result of State policies adversely affected women’s land rights, especially because in most cases their opinions were never sought as they lacked jural authority in the decision-making process. The formulation of customary inheritance laws on landed property has involved a complex process of interaction between the (colonial and post-colonial) state and different segments of the population, the interplay of various ideologies and interests, and the conflicting pulls of scriptural rules and local customs. Today, laws governing the inheritance of landed property in India vary by religion and region. In some parts, these variations originated in the colonial state’s characterization of inheritance and marriage as ‘personal laws’ as applicable to members of particular communities. However, these characterizations persisted in post-independence codifications which nevertheless sought to establish a

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degree of uniformity. In India, the variations in inheritance patterns stem from different rules in relation to the inheritance of agricultural land, and in the various tenurial enactments passed by provincial (state) legislatures which in 1935 were given legislative power over such lands. Before British rule, local customs, influenced in varying degree by the shastras, formed the basis of Hindu law. Under British rule, the adaptability associated with customary systems declined. Over time, the British came to recognize that traditionally there had been no fixed Hindu law that could be applied to all Hindus. Taking cognizance of this, regulations were passed giving precedence to custom over the shastras. But with overall changes the new legal institutions eroded local ones operating on a caste, religion and regional basis. All these changes nevertheless had a negative impact on women’s rights in landed property. So by the turn of the twentieth century there was an increasing demand by women for the codification of Hindu personal law, especially by many women’s organizations who demanded, along with many other rights, the right to inherit and control property. In India, the property rights of Hindu women are highly fragmented on the basis of several factors apart from religion and the geographical region to which they belong. The property rights of Hindu women also vary depending on the status of the woman in the family and her marital status: whether the woman is a daughter, married or unmarried or deserted, wife or widow or mother. It also depends on the kind of property one is looking at, whether the property is hereditary/ancestral or self-acquired, land or dwelling house, or matrimonial property. Today the property rights of Hindus are governed by the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 (applicable to all states except Jammu and Kashmir). However the Act has special provision for Hindu matrilineal communities. The act does not cover the communities of the north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, where local customs prevail. Nonetheless, the act sought to unify the Mitakshara and Dayabhaga systems, and purported to lay down a law of succession whereby sons and daughters would enjoy equal inheritance rights, as would brothers and sisters, although gender inequalities continue. To redeem this in Kerala, the Kerala Joint Hindu Family System (Abolition) Act of 1976 deemed all family members with an interest in the Hindu Undivided family estate as holding their shares separately as full owners from then onwards. Andhra Pradesh in 1986 and Tamil Nadu in 1989 amended the Hindu Succession Act to recognize unmarried daughters as coparceners by birth in their own right, giving them claims equal to those of sons in joint family property.

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However, two factors in particular have led to a disjunction between women’s general legal rights in property and their rights in agricultural land. First, legislative power is divided between the Union and the Province (state) legislature under the principle of federalism; and on agricultural land-related enactments the State governments have had, and continue to have, considerable legislative powers; thus legislation affecting women’s rights in certain categories of agricultural land varies by state, reflecting regional differences in social attitudes and legal approaches, especially due to the Government of India Act of 1935, whereby legislative powers in relation to agricultural land are vested exclusively in the state. Consequently, the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act of 1937 did not apply to agricultural land. Women’s legal rights to agricultural land still continue to show vast disparity by region, especially in relation to ‘tenancy’ and ‘surplus’ land above ceiling limits. Although the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 specifically exempted tenancy rights in agricultural land, with the exception of a few states, daughters and sisters are totally excluded as heirs in favour of male heirs. For the 82 per cent of India’s population that is Hindu, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 governs rights relating to intestate succession, i.e. inheritance in the absence of a will. The Succession Act provides for the devolution of separate (usually self-acquired) property in equal shares to the male and female children and widow of the deceased, and if the deceased is male, his mother. In contrast, joint family property, i.e. ancestral property and property owned by the family as a unit, devolves by survivorship. Traditionally, male family members became “coparceners” (a coparcenary is a legal institution consisting of three generations of male heirs in the family) and received an undivided share of the joint family property at birth; female family members were excluded from sharing in the joint family property. The Mitakashara school of Hindu law, however, recognizes a difference between ancestral property and self-acquired property. An amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 nevertheless established the rights of daughters and widows of sons to a share in ancestral agricultural land and includes daughters as “coparceners” in the Mitaksara joint family property, with the same birthrights as sons to share, to claim partition, and to become “managers”, while also sharing liabilities. Some states acted to equalize the intestate inheritance rights of women under the Succession Act. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra extend co-parcenar rights at birth to daughters, and Kerala abandoned the concept of joint family property altogether. However, the amendments do not reach daughters who married before

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the amendments came into effect, and wives are not granted any right to joint family property. Furthermore, nothing in the Succession Act precludes a testator from disinheriting his wives and daughters by will. Thus, the rights these state amendments intended to bestow can be circumvented and may ultimately be illusory. The intestacy rights of Muslims, who constitute approximately 12 per cent of the population, are governed by Muslim Personal Law, as set forth in the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937. The Act grants widows and daughters who are in the same relation as a male family member to the deceased half the share of property received by the male family member. The Act prohibits a Muslim man from bequeathing more than one-third of his property by will, so he cannot completely disinherit his spouse and female children. Muslim women’s inheritance rights in India show a marked divergence historically between scriptural texts and customs. But unlike the Hindu texts, the Koran gave women significant inheritance rights, including in land, although these rights were unequal to men’s, except in matrilineal communities. In between were Muslim communities among whom affluent families sometimes gave daughters a share of patrimony under the Shariat, or occasionally created an endowment (waqf) for them, both of which resulted in a number of Muslim women from such families controlling property, including land. During British rule, among patrilineal groups, where Islamic law was strictly applied, it strengthened Muslim women’s access to property in two ways: 1) by recognizing their inheritance share as dictated by the Shariat where the custom disinheriting women would otherwise have ruled; and 2) by enforcing the women’s right to mehr—the sum of money or property normally promised to the bride by the bridegroom as part of the marriage contract, but not necessarily paid at the time of marriage, and which many Muslims treated merely as a symbolic amount which they did not actually expect to pay in full. But British court rulings tended to support the claims of the widows, granting them control over their husband’s property until mehr was paid. Under the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, prevailing customs or usage were abrogated by explicitly excluding from its purview agricultural land which constituted the bulk of property held by the Muslim community. Once again it was the women who had to suffer loss, although in 1949, after Independence, in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, the Act was amended to include agricultural land; in 1963, Kerala did the same. But in several states of north-west India like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, the act has not been amended to include agricultural land, and customs prevailing prior to

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the act (along with land reform laws) still govern the succession of such land, as they do in Jammu and Kashmir (which was not covered by the act). But a shift to Shariat in relation to the succession of agricultural land had a contrary effect on Indian Muslim women belonging to the matrilineal communities, namely the Mappilas of north Kerala and Lakshadweep Islands whose property inheritance was governed by the Marumakkatayam laws, under which women had primary inheritance rights in ancestral property, including land. Subsequent enactments in the 1960s, however, extended the jurisdiction of the Shariat to all property held by the Mappilas, and under the Mappila Marummakathayam (Amendment) Act of Kerala in 1963, the share of any member of the Mappila taravad would devolve according to Shariat law rather than the matrilineal law. These amendments thus subordinated Mappila women’s rights, even in ancestral property, to those of men. Today, the vast majority of Muslims in India belong to the Sunni sect and are governed by the Hanafi School of Sunni law, while a small percentage are Shiites, governed by the Ithna Ashari School of Shia law. The inheritance rules under both systems are quite complex. Broadly, heirs are divided into three major categories: agnatic heirs, who are almost all male; Koranic heirs who are mostly female; and ‘distant kindred’ who include all blood relations who are neither agnatic heirs nor Koranic heirs. The Sunni laws favoured men whereas the Shia system had more positive implications for women’s inheritance. But in general, under all schools of Islamic law, Muslim women have inheritance in immovable property, although unequal to that of men. The laws for Christians vary according to domicile. For instance, Christians from Goa are governed by the Portuguese Civil Code; those from Cochin and Travancore (Kerala), until recently by the Cochin Christian Succession Act of 1921, and The Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916, respectively, (those in Punjab and the Christian tribals in the north-eastern states of India by their customary laws; and the rest of India by the Indian Succession Act of 1925). In 1949 the former princely states of Travancore and Cochin merged within the Indian Union. It was only in 1983 that the Travancore Act of 1916 was challenged in the Supreme Court by Mary Roy (the mother of Arundhati Roy) on the grounds that it violated the constitutional guarantee of equal rights for both sexes. The Supreme Court upheld that after the inclusion of Travancore and Cochin within the Indian Union, the relevant law governing Christians in those regions was the ISA of 1925, and by this judgment the Travancore-Cochin Succession Act of 1916 stood superseded by the ISA Act of 1925, with retrospective effect from 1951.

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One effect of this judgment is that daughters and sons can now share equally in the father’s property, although in most cases women prefer to waive their land and property rights in favour of their brother(s) for the sake of access to natal homes in cases of marital discord. Women today have considerable legal rights to inherit landed property, although women in traditionally patrilineal communities rarely realize the rights that contemporary laws have promised them. Custom still dominates practice. Hence the vast majority of women do not inherit landed property as daughters, for as daughters, women’s claims appear to enjoy little social legitimacy, and the greatest likelihood of daughters inheriting is still in sonless families. Endowing brotherless daughters is explicitly forbidden by custom in some communities, such as the Gaddis of Himachal Pradesh, among whom women cannot hold any land, not even self-acquired (Newell 1962). Adopting a male child as heir was preferred to passing inheritance to one’s own daughter. In northern parts of India, cases of daughters inheriting land directly from parents are therefore rare. Even today, there is wide-spread resistance to the idea of daughters getting any share in landed property in northern India, even in communities that may give dowries to their daughters, although the amount inherited is usually less than the daughter’s legal shares in most cases. Research shows that what is striking in overall terms is that in all states, including Kerala, a significant majority of women, although legally eligible, do not inherit as daughters (Agarwal 253). In some tribal communities, unmarried daughters customarily have usufruct rights to land, as among the Ho and Santal tribals of Bihar in Eastern India. In fact, many Ho women today choose to remain unmarried for the sake of this access (Kishwar 1987). As widows, women’s claims enjoy somewhat greater social legitimacy than the claims of daughters. In India, the perception that a widow has a right to a share in the deceased husband’s land appears fairly wide-spread, but in practice many who are eligible do not inherit, and those who do inherit acquire it on severely restricted terms. Research shows that in most cases women do not inherit the absolute estate they are entitled to under contemporary law. And having land in her name does not mean that the widow is allowed full control over it. However, in this overall restricted inheritance of land by Hindu widows in India, there are regional variations, especially between north and south India. Dreze’s (1990) finding in his survey of north Indian villages contrasts with Mary Chen’s survey of widows in south India. Land rights of widows are relatively better recognized in the south than in the north. Even many tribal communities in India recognize the widow’s claims to a limited interest in her

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deceased husband’s property, especially if she has no sons. But it is seen that even women’s limited interest in land is strongly resisted by their husband’s kin. In Muslim communities, although most widows inherit, they do so only as legal custodians of sons, although there are also cases of widows with land in their own names. In capacities other than as daughters and widows, women (especially among Hindus) virtually never get land. It is rare for a sister to inherit. Against this backdrop, it is important to understand that the disinheritance of women as daughters is a critical gender issue which cannot be made up even if women’s rights as widows are fully recognized, for widows constitute only a small percentage of the rural female population. Hence, once disinherited as daughters, most rural women for the major part of their lives would have no land of their own, while the inheritance of males as sons is well recognized. The possibility of rural women acquiring land through means other than inheritance is usually small. Of course, it is possible for a woman to purchase land from her own resources. But the barriers to this can be three-fold: x Limited/no economic resources of their own, even for women from well off households; x Difficulties in undertaking land transactions without male mediation (due to lack of literacy, custom and cultural prohibition); and x The dearth of arable land for sale. Hence, instances of women purchasing land are few, and if they do purchase, the plot is usually very small.

Barriers to women inheriting land x x x x

‘Voluntary’ giving up of claims by women; The necessity of male mediation; Hostility from male kin often leading to direct violence; and The biased response of village bodies and government officials.

Typically, women give up their claims in parental ancestral property in favour of their brothers for a complex variety of reasons. The crucial importance that women place on their relationship with their brothers and on access to natal homes can only be understood in the context of their overall life situations like early arranged marriages, patrilocal residence and village exogamy; economic, social and physical vulnerability in case

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of marital discord, ill-treatment, marriage break-up or widowhood; and ritual connections and strong emotional ties with brothers. Access to the natal home can be a significant element in women’s economic security and fall-back position, and brothers are a crucial link to the natal home even when the parents are alive, and more so after their death. Often visits to the natal home serve as the main or only respite from the drudgery of housework, childcare, and fieldwork and represent periods of rest and personal freedom. Economically, limited access to personal property (especially in the form of productive assets), illiteracy, limited training in income-earning skills, restricted employment and low wages from available work can all constrain women’s access to earning and independent economic survival, especially for rural women of most classes and communities. Similarly, female seclusion and the social stigma attached to widowhood and divorce and cultural construction of gender, including the definition of how a ‘good’ sister would behave, also discourage women from claiming their rights. Impinging on these dilemmas are other practical considerations. Rural women’s relationships with the world outside the family are typically mediated through male relatives: father, brother, husband, or sons. This also affects women’s access to economic institutions (markets, banks, and so on), and also their access to judicial and administrative bodies. Further, female seclusion restricts their physical and social mobility, their domain of activity, knowledge and education, and hence has serious consequences for women’s ability to claim land and control it. A brother is thus seen as a potential support, but there are also many instances when this very dependency on male relatives, especially brothers, leaves women vulnerable to being duped, especially when they are the interested parties. Manipulating a woman’s statement or claiming that she has given up her rights is made easier, especially when norms of female seclusion are strong. Further, it is clear that male heirs are not ready to relinquish their privileges. In many states of India male relatives of potential female heirs take pre-emptive steps to circumvent the rights of women, especially daughters and sisters, and in some instances fathers, to ensure that only sons would inherit, leave wills explicitly disinheriting daughters. Brothers have also been known to persuade or coerce their sisters into signing a deed gifting their share of land to them. Natal kin are particularly hostile to the idea of daughters and sisters inheriting land, since the property can pass outside the patrilineal descent group. When women do not voluntarily give up their claims, male kin may try various forms of intimidation. A common tactic is to initiate expensive

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litigation, which few women can financially afford (Kishwar 1987). Direct violence is also being increasingly used to prevent women from filing claims. Beating a woman into submission, and even murder are not unknown. Indeed, in eastern and central India, murder following accusations of ‘witch’ killing is on the rise, particularly in Bihar and West Bengal. The erosion of women’s customary rights and the increasing incidence of land-related ‘witch’ killings is particularly apparent among a number of tribal communities in Bihar such as Santal, Ho and Munda. Evidence provided by Chaudhuri (1987) and Kelkar and Nathan (1991) for Santal, by Kishwar (1987) for the Ho, and by Standing (1987) for the Munda, suggest that the incidence of witch killing has today become a means of preventing women in these communities from exercising their customary claims in land. Apart from the attitudes of kith and kin, a significant determinant of women’s ability to exercise their legal rights is the male bias in administrative and judicial bodies. Traditionally, at the village level, both legislative and judicial functions were served by local councils: caste panchayats in most of India, tribal council among tribal communities and the village samaj in community groupings. A common feature in all these was the total exclusion of women. Women had little say either in framing the rules made by these councils or in the process by which these rules were enforced. Basically, this exclusion meant that disputes which involved women were settled by male authority. Ironically, even in matrilineal communities, jural authority rested with men. Only rarely, as among the Santal tribals of Bihar or the Bhats of Uttar Pradesh, were women allowed to attend tribal council meetings. Under colonial rule, the role of traditional councils was eroded with the setting up of British legislative and judicial machinery. In the 1950s attempts were made to democratize the system with the setting up of the Panchayti Raj in an attempt to increase female representation at the local level. But Gram panchayats ruling in north-west India have been observed to favour the view that family property should be inherited by sons and not daughters (Agarwal 279). Given the trend toward village exogamy and the male bias in access to legal and administrative institutions, the disadvantages that women face in protecting their rights are likely to be felt more acutely, and with increasing land scarcity the interests of all contenders are likely to lead to further conflicts. Gender inequalities also arise from land reform enactments related to the fixing of ceilings. In most states, adult sons get special consideration. Only in Kerala do both unmarried adult sons and unmarried adult

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daughters count as separate units, and in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh, married minor daughters also receive no recognition. In matrilineal communities, however, their rights in landed property clearly conferred important benefits on women, but their virtual exclusion from property management (like among the Nayar and the Khasi) and from jural and overall public authority, circumscribes the power they could derive from those rights (Agarwal 151). In a country where 89 per cent of families own some land, research establishes that women’s land ownership determines not only income and access to food, but also dignity, status, vulnerability of women to sexual assault, ability to get credit, and bargaining power in negotiating wages when working on others’ land. Recent studies by Eapen and others from Kerala have established that land/house ownership has made women less vulnerable to abandonment (and destitution) and domestic violence. Wherever women have owned property, their relationship to the spouse and family has been more equal. And of course, when women own property much of the justification for dowry comes into question. The Rural Development Institute (RDI) conducted research into the topic of women’s access and rights to land in the Indian state of West Bengal to shed further light on why women are not landowners, and what might be done to foster their ownership of land. It was found that very few rural women own either agricultural land or the houses they live in. Despite government policies promoting joint titling, little joint titling of government-granted land is occurring. One of the most common reasons for selling land or other assets is to raise money for a daughter’s dowry/wedding. Dowry is prevalent and has been rising in all of the villages visited, with the exception of some tribal areas where bride price is still practiced. Many families interviewed have sold or mortgaged land or animals to raise a dowry. There is a general awareness of the rights granted to widows, daughters and sisters under the written inheritance laws, but these rights are not frequently exercised. Separated women almost always lose access to land they worked during marriage. They can generally return to their birth family’s home for shelter, but often must earn their own money for food. Separated women do not receive land from their former husbands and very rarely receive monetary maintenance. Women who hold title to land in their own name prize the security with which the land endows them. Even if they are not able to work the land themselves, due to age or social restrictions, women say that having a piece of land in their own name gives them something to contribute to the family and ensures that their sons will care for them in their old age. Similarly, fieldwork conducted in Karnataka suggests that the amendment

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to include Hindu daughters as co-parcenars has had little practical effect on female inheritance patterns. Most women interviewed stated that daughters considered their dowry and wedding costs as their fair share of family resources, and they rarely claimed their legal right to a share of the family property. Even Muslim women noted that their daughters could inherit agricultural land (presumably under local customs), but they reported that daughters usually elected not to claim a right to the land in order to be free to turn to their brothers for assistance as necessary. In the predominantly male-dominated society that makes up this world, there is no doubt that women have always been discriminated against. The gender biases are deep-rooted and are reflected in women’s lack of access to, and control over, land and property in particular. While on the one hand, women’s social and legal position is often responsible for increasing their vulnerability, on the other hand economic development and urbanization further jeopardize women’s right to land. The process of development that changes the pattern of land use has also brought with it involuntary dislocation. This results in the breakdown of community networks, the loss of livelihoods and resources, and the disruption of social services. Indeed the very life of people, especially women, gets disrupted. Loss of land resources for subsistence and income may lead to economic hardship, social tensions and impoverishment. The issue of women’s rights in land (and more generally in property) has been, until recently, largely neglected in both research and policy. In fact, in almost all developing countries, large-scale surveys and agricultural censuses collect property-related information only by households, without disaggregating by gender. Independent and effective land rights for women have been identified by researchers and policy makers as vitally important for family welfare, food security, gender equality, empowerment, economic efficiency and poverty alleviation (Agarwal 1994, 2002). The World Bank policy research report Land policies for growth and poverty reduction points to evidence that increased control by women over land and other assets could have ‘a strong and immediate effect on the welfare of the next generation and on the level and pace at which human and physical capital are accumulated’ (WB 2003:38). Establishing and clarifying land rights through formalization has become a key issue in development policies, which aim to promote more productive uses of land. While women in India have the legal right to own land, very few do. For those women who do own land, ownership rarely translates into control of the land or of the assets flowing from the land. In comparison to the amount of privately owned land in India, the amount of land available for distribution by the government is minimal.

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The majority of land distributed by states has been government wasteland and ceiling surplus land. According to government estimates, as of 2000, states distributed more than five million acres of ceiling surplus land and over 14 million acres of wasteland to selected beneficiaries. Men received title to the vast majority of the land distributed because they were deemed to be the heads of households or the cultivators of the land. Belated government efforts to address the gender imbalance in land ownership through policies dictating how title should be granted in land distribution programmes have suffered from the same lack of enforcement as revisions to discriminatory inheritance laws. For example, West Bengal issued a circular in 1992 requiring government land to be issued jointly in the name of husbands and wives, or to women individually “to the extent possible”. West Bengal issued the circular 14 years after the land distribution programme began, and while the state did issue a second circular restating the joint title requirement- it did not require retroactive application of the policy. As a result, joint titling was not a requirement for the majority of land distributed. In Assam, the government issued a policy in 1989 that all government land would be titled in the name of both spouses, “conferring joint title to the husband and the wife of a family”. To date, however, the government continues to grant pattas in the name of the husband only. There is still surplus land available for distribution in these and other states and to which a joint title requirement can be applied. Approximately 86 per cent of India’s arable land is privately owned, and theoretically the most likely source for women to obtain land. However, entry into the land market requires a variety of assets, including money (or something of value), bargaining power, the confidence and skills required to manage the land, or the ability to enter into relationships that allow third parties to manage the land. Few rural women have the financial, social, and human assets needed to enter the land market. Without intervention, it is unlikely that women will gain significantly in land ownership simply through operation of the land market. Given these restrictions to women’s participation in the land market, it is ironic that the rural land market in India is in large measure driven by the lives of women. The marriages that transition women from their families of origin to their husbands’ families provide the impetus for a high per-cent-age of rural land sales. Faced with dowry and wedding costs that may rival the price of an acre of land, families with smallholdings are often forced to sell or mortgage their land to support a daughter’s transition to married life. The financial assets transfer as a result of the marriage, but women are no more able to control those assets in their new roles as wives than they were in their prior incarnation as daughters. In

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Andhra Pradesh, legislation currently prohibits a husband and wife from owning land jointly, and the state is, therefore, a good place to obtain information about the effects of individual title and opinions about the possible value (or lack of value) of joint title. The Land Acquisition Act 1894 (amended in 1984) has thus caused major suffering to women in the process of displacement. In India, the debate about women’s land rights and the impact they can have on rural wealth creation and security is minimal. Even in places where policy has been changing, such as in Karnataka and West Bengal, implementation is slow, and patriarchal attitudes are proving more powerful than the law. Women’s Policy adopted by Maharashtra in 2001 supports land rights for women, and in 2003, the state government issued a Government Resolution (GR) to that effect. Andhra Pradesh state government was the first among all states of India, to declare land and property rights for women during the mid-nineties. It was followed by amendments in the Hindu Code Bill after the public interest litigation was filed demanding co- parcenary rights for Hindu daughters in the ancestral property. The State of West Bengal is recognized as a leader among Indian states in implementing land reform measures to benefit sharecroppers and to redistribute ceiling surplus land to the landless. These successful reforms, however, largely failed to target women. The issue of women’s land rights in India has, until recently, received little attention in policy formulation. It was only in the Sixth Five Year Plan (1980-85) that the first, but limited, recognition of women’s need for land (and then only in the context of poverty) was mentioned. The recommendations made in the 1979 FAO Report of the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, held in Rome, against gender discriminatory laws in respect to ‘rights in inheritance, ownership and control of property’ added pressure on the Indian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and eventually it incorporated the recommendations (albeit in a diluted form) in the policy statement of the Sixth Year Plan. However, even this limited formulation remained only a promise on paper. It was in the Eighth Plan that two specific points in relation to women and land were made. The first, recognized that ‘one of the basic requirements for improving the status of women’ is to change inheritance laws so that women get an equal share in parental property, inherited or self-acquired (GOI 1992b: 392).And the second, that state governments have been asked to allot 40 per cent of surplus land to women alone, and to allot the rest jointly in the names of husband and wife (GOI 1992b: 34). This sounded good until one recognized how little land is involved. So the process of incorporating the issue of women and

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land into public policy in India has been extremely slow and, even today, despite noted progress, continues to remain an issue of marginal, not central, concern. Historically, land revenue has long been a key element of public service. Land policy and administration is essential not only for the longterm development of the economy but also as a key asset and basis of livelihood for the poor, especially women. It is therefore important to place the women’s question within the larger one of land reforms and demand for structural changes that would allow access to health and education. It is true that India had adopted policies to redistribute land to overcome the legacy of a highly unequal land ownership structure. Economist Devaki Jain has stated that the eleventh plan incorporated housing and land rights for women as a component, but the real challenge lies in ensuring its implementation, for lack of enforcement has often limited the effectiveness of most government policies regarding women’s right to land. It is certainly ironic that even after sixty-odd years of independence, India still has not been able to resolve the interlinked questions of land distribution, caste hierarchy and gender discrimination. Despite gender-progressive legislation, in practice few Indian women inherit landed property, and fewer control it. Opponents of women’s land rights often argue that there is not enough land to provide a livelihood for the rural population. But having one’s own land, even a small plot, is critically important, although it might just be one element in a diversified livelihood system (Agarwal 469). The constraints that prevent women from attaining land rights may not be easy to surmount without an overall change in mindsets from deep-rooted gender bias and prejudices. But at least the process of acquiring land rights is likely to be as important in empowering women as the end result. Today, legal inequalities in relation to women’s land rights stem from two sources: inheritance laws, and land reform-related legislature. Hence, to establish women’s effective land rights will require not only removing existing gender inequalities in the law, but also ensuring that the laws are implemented. It is also important to ensure that women’s legal property shares are registered in their names in the land records and that women are able to control their share independently. Apart from asserting their inheritance rights in private land, the most important means of land acquisition for women (especially of poor rural households) is through the state. In the post-colonial period, it is true that there has been distribution of individual land titles under various land reform and resettled schemes, the leasing out of government land under wasteland development and reforestation schemes, and legalizing the distribution of land claimed by

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peasant groups through land struggle, for instance as in the Bodhgaya land struggle, but few women have become land owners. Individual land ownership allows greater control over land use and the freedom to bequeath and (if necessary) mortgage or sell the land. But individual ownership also has the disadvantage where there is the likelihood of rural uneducated women being duped by greedy moneylenders or by male relatives. Collective ownership, where the land would belong not to a joint family or clan but to a group of poor peasant women would strengthen women’s ability to retain control over land by creating or preserving a more communal and egalitarian basis of land access, where joint investment in capital, equipment and cooperation in terms of laboursharing, product marketing, etc., could prove beneficial since most rural women may not have adequate financial resources of their own. In India, NGOs like SEWA have been more successful in providing technical information, production inputs, and marketing facilities to groups of women farmers. But in spite of all these, Indian women still have a long way to travel before attaining equality in land rights.

CHAPTER THREE WOMEN’S LAND RIGHTS IN KERALA: A CASE STUDY OF PATHANAMTHITTA DISTRICT

“It is impossible to think of the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is impossible for a bird to fly on one wing” (Swami Vivekananda)

Land is a wealth-creating and livelihood-sustaining asset. In Kerala, land has become precious in the wake of the booming building construction industry which has turned land into a commodity that can be bought and sold. This has resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being converted into residential areas and also for developing industry, tourism, infrastructure, expansion of rail, road, educational institutions, IT parks, newer hospitals, tourist resorts, shopping complexes, as well as somewhere to dump our increasing waste. As a result there is hardly any land left for agriculture, especially for food production. The total land area of Kerala is 38.863 sq.km, of which agricultural land comprises 21,800 sq. km (56.1 per cent); the irrigated area is 13,610 sq. km (62.4 per cent); tree crops and groves occupy 640 sq. km (1.6 per cent) and the forest covers 10,510 sq. km (27.8 per cent)(Bonell et al, 1993). Earlier there were paddy fields practically everywhere in the state of Kerala, and Kuttanad in Alleppey district and Palghat were regarded as the rice granaries of Kerala. In fact, agricultural labourers constituted nearly a quarter of the total number of workers in Kerala. However, with more than fifty per cent of the paddy fields having disappeared, there is distress in Kerala’s agriculture. Farmers and peasants in many parts of the world had benefited from the land reforms, and in Kerala the agrarian reforms of 1957 did bring about a major redistribution of landed property and increased the wages and other benefits of farm workers, but nonetheless land reforms in agriculture have failed to boost agriculture and food security, although Kerala cultivates 56.1 per cent of its land. K. Saradamoni in her study

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examines how the progressive breakdown of landlordism in Palghat and the accompanying socio-cultural changes affected women belonging to different strata of the agricultural community. But Kudumbashree, a statewide network of women’s groups in Kerala, and the Government’s main anti-poverty programme has, with their innovative approach, been able to solve the crisis of food security to a great extent. The Kudumbashree women throughout the 14 districts of Kerala have come together to form farming collectives where they jointly lease land, cultivate it, use the produce to meet their consumption needs and sell the surplus to local markets. This participation by women in agriculture, in particular, ensures that women, as producers, have control over the production, distribution and consumption of food. This strategy for involving women in agriculture thus came at a very crucial time for Kerala. Kerala is considered one of India’s most progressive states because of exceptionally high female literacy, life expectancy and related health indicators which are comparable to those of many other developed countries. However, Modern Kerala represents a paradox with rising consumerism, escalating dowry demands, high unemployment, persistent poverty, high suicide rates, and gender-based violence. The high level of literacy, it seems, has not helped the women in Kerala in increasing their decision-making capacity. On the contrary, education has had an inverse relation to the empowerment of women. Despite claims that women enjoy high status in Kerala, economic, social, and cultural factors interplay and there exist gender differences in ownership, control, and access to critical agricultural resources, including land. Pradeep Panda in his study shows how women’s access to, and control of, economic resources—especially immovable assets like land and houses—plays a critical role in protecting women from marital violence (Panda 2003). But socioeconomic changes and crises which render agricultural land as a main source of livelihood are leading to the women’s share of land being sold, with gains going to men. Christian succession laws in Kerala too clearly illustrate that legal provisions alone can have only a limited impact on changing gendered power structures. The State of Kerala comprises the former princely states of Travancore, Cochin and Malabar. Travancore, through its contact with the British, revolutionized land reforms. The period 1912-1936 is of special importance in the history of land relations and the land policy in Travancore. The Government of Travancore introduced the Nair Act of 1912, which altered the land ownership rights of the Nair joint families. By 1936, all restrictions imposed on alienation, inheritance and partition of ancestral lands had been removed. Feudal privileges based on

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landownership were abolished and all registered tenants assured of enjoyment of their holdings without hindrance. The resultant social transformation was mainly the result of changes in the agrarian system, with change in ownership, land utilization pattern, and modes of sharing the produce of the land. Earlier economic relations were based on land ownership that controlled social formations and organizations. The land system and social customs in the princely state of Travancore differed from the rest of south India, but even within there were many differences, based on the custom and practice of the caste and community. For instance, the Nairs/Nayars of south Travancore differed greatly from their counterparts in north Travancore. Even among Christians, Syrian Christians enjoyed higher economic and social status. In the pre-colonial period, landlordism and the caste system influenced the socio-economic life of the people. The low castes were not allowed to own land or possess property. Land was broadly divided into two categories: Pandaravaka (belonging to the state) and Janmam (belonging to private individuals). The state and Janmis (landlords) were not themselves cultivators; they had the land cultivated by the tenants. The joint family system of the main families, especially Nairs, Namboodiris and Nanjinad Vellalas led to the concentration of land ownership in the hands of these communities. Families, not individuals possessed property, and the sale of landed property was very rare. The rigidity of the land-ownership pattern was an obstacle to the promotion of colonial interests and so existing land utilization patterns were changed to increase production in agriculture. The emphasis on the production of commercial crops necessitated credit facilities for the cultivator. The tenants had only one available source of credit, i.e., the sale or mortgage of their holdings. But since the majority of them were tenants of state-owned lands, they had no rights to the land they cultivated. So the tenants did not venture to invest capital for the improvement of land. In 1862, the government for the first time decided to levy arrears of land revenue. In order to change the land utilization pattern and to ensure regular payment of land tax, the government decided to give propriety rights to tenants through a pattam proclamation in 1865. Thus tenants acquired full property rights. Previously, land had less value than crops, because land was easily available. In 1865 a new class of landlords emerged-the new middle class. A new system of pokkuvaravu was introduced in 1889, which made it compulsory for land holders to register their holdings and take a patta or title deed. The demand for payment of tax forced cultivators to produce cash crops. Commercialization of

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agriculture forced on the peasantry thus lead to the introduction of the market economy. Traditionally, Kerala had matrilineal societies with land rights bestowed on women. The Nair caste and a few other communities in Kerala traditionally practiced inheritance through the female line, but 80 per cent of Kerala’s people are not Nairs. The Nampoothiris were a patrilineal community where the illam (household) was structured on the basis of male primogeniture. Only the eldest male could inherit and manage the family property. In bygone days, most of the land of Kerala belonged to the Nampoothiri caste, who were land owners, and hence all other people, including the Nairs, lived in perpetual fear of being evicted from their land if they incurred the displeasure of the land owner. The Nayar Tharavadu (household) emerged in eighteenth century Malabar. The most significant feature of the tharavadu formation was that women were central to their creation. Descent was always traced from an ancestress. In the Nayar matrilineal tharavadu there were joint rights to the family property. Inheritance was traced through women, which implied that women had the right to receive and bequeath ancestral property. Other than the right to set up a new branch, the women in these matrilineal families had rights to property and to unilineal succession to properties demarcated specially for them. Since inheritance and lineage were through women, the birth of a girl was a welcome event in matrilineal families thereby eliminating at least the more extreme forms of discrimination (Alexander, 2000; Jeffery, 1992). Senior women, particularly of competence, in the bigger tharavadus had an important role in making and/or influencing decisions regarding the household and property (Gough, 1961). Men of the household had a right to a share of the family property but only while living in it. But they could not bequeath it to their offspring or to their wives. In colonial times, matriliny under colonial law was unabashedly patriarchal, investing the right to manage and regulate property in the senior male. So on the one hand, there were property rights, characterized by descent/lineage from mothers to daughters respectively, and managerial powers on the other, flowing from senior and junior male members, although this practice differed from patrilineal forms of family in terms of their implications for women. Importantly, in comparison with patrilineal societies the oppressive edge of widowhood was absent. On the other hand, among patrilineal groups marriage (expressed through several ritual observations) marked the severing of a woman’s ties with the natal house/family.

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The structure of the matrilineal tharavadu thus changed from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, which concomitantly affected the rights of the women within the household. There was a discursive shift in the power relationships within the tharavadu. Until the early nineteenth century, power within the tharavadu was more of a generational privilege than a gendered right. Women had special entitlements within the household but with the steady singling out of the Karnavan (the mother’s brother) or eldest male in the tharavadu as the figure to make a settlement with the East India Company, in the early decades of the nineteenth century a ‘sexual contract’ was created between the state and the men (Arunima 18). The colonial state thus altered the existing equation of rights among the matrikins. Such a contract allowed these men power both as Karnavan in relation to the tharavadu and as janmi in relation to agrarian dependents. The new law and legal procedures that were introduced had an adverse impact on the rights of women within the tharavadu. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Karnavan became a figure of power with which women had to contend within the tharavadu. Correspondingly, with company rule, gendered rights began to emerge in relation to property and authority, with men gaining greater legitimacy than women. However, the Nayar reform movements challenged the power of the Karnavan, but their demand for marriage reforms, tenant’s rights or family partition allowed no room for the rights of women held hitherto within the tharavadu. Besides, women in the tharavadu received hardly any public education which would enable them to take up any professional employment. This meant that they rarely had any ready cash that would allow them to acquire their own property, although with the changes in the legal redefinition of land tenures men continued to amass landed property either as ‘family property’ or ‘selfacquisition’ over which women had no rights. The tharavadu was now redefined as a co-residential unit enforcing collective rights on its members. In 1850 the consensus among jurists over land disputes was that no women had the right to succeed to the position of ‘karnavatti’ (the only exception being women from royal families). In 1870 the High Court decreed that only men had the authority to ‘manage’ land. Thus the dominant legal discourse of the latter half of the nineteenth century attempted to create distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres on the basis of gendered differences in rights to property, authority and work. The impact of the public/private divide often meant disallowing women from undertaking property transactions or managing the household economy. The property disputes between men and women during this period clearly show the disjunction between the rights of men and women. While men as

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individuals could question a Karnavan’s decision regarding the sale or management of property, women could do so only if they represented ‘the family’ and thus a collective interest. Thus gender privilege was accessible only to men. The growth of caste consciousness is another factor that contributed to the breakup of matrilineal practices. Matriliny was considered the root cause of all problems befalling the Nayars (Arunima 25). The conjunction of family and land laws in the 1930s acted as a catalyst for the transformation of matriliny in Kerala. The spate of land sales escalated rapidly, and the tharavadu (household) began to undergo a steady process of division. This affected not only the property rights of the individual members but also their residence patterns. The Madras Marumakkathayam Act of 1933 did not just dismantle the matrilineal tharavadu, but also allowed husbands to become property owners. This decision was reinforced by the Hindu Code of 1950 and by the abolition of matrilineal kinship by the Kerala Legislation in 1976. Consequently, Hindu laws and patrilineal descent became part of Nayar life. Thus matrilineal kinship in Kerala gained the unique distinction of being the only kinship in the world to be abolished (Arunima 1). This was achieved through a series of legislative interventions that were initiated during colonial times and completed by post-colonial Kerala legislation. Today, Kerala is a deeply patriarchal society where neither literacy nor education has been able to change mindsets, and strangely, none of the social or political movements that contributed to great changes in Kerala have ever taken up gender issues or tried to uphold the dignity of women. In the mid-twentieth century, Gough (1952) found that the tharavadu (matrilineal joint family) houses were inherited matrilineally, but sons and daughters inherited other property. In Fuller’s (1976) study of a village in central Travancore, a distinction continued to be made between (i) tharavadu land inherited matrilineally, the alienation of which required the consent of all adult matrilineal descendents of the person holding it, and (ii) separate land which was freely alienable. Researches conducted in central Travancore show that women continue to inherit a house but are less likely to receive agricultural land (Osella and Osella cited in Agarwal 1994: 177). More importantly, Osella and Osella (2000: 106), while not commenting directly on the inheritance rights of women, have noted that the transfer of their share of land is recorded in the community register of the Nair Service Society (NSS) and Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP) for the Nairs and Ezhavas respectively, suggesting that inheritance has been replaced in a substantial way by transfer on marriage or as dowry. It is also significant that this land is often sold and the cash

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equivalent given to the husband, and that the dowry is not usually under the control of the girl. Thus many women no longer had land to pass on to their daughters, and mother-daughter inheritance is becoming rare. A series of Acts in the early twentieth century introduced measures ‘recognizing’ the conjugal family (as against the matrilineal family, which did not centre on conjugality) and defining relations of protection and dependence between husband and wife and father and children and which facilitated a patrifocal family among the matrilineal Hindu groups (the term ‘patrifocal’ was used by Mukhopadhyay and Seymour (1994). They distinguish “patrifocal” from “patriarchy” which tends to imply a monolithic system in which males always predominate in all settings and socio-economic contexts, and at all stages of the life-cycle). Hindu women now had individual rights over their share of family property but this right was achieved within a legal framework of dependence on men as husbands. The Hindu matrilineal social groups today have come within the ambit of the Hindu civil code, with some special provisions such as their exclusion from the mitakshara (Hindu Undivided Family) coparcenary. Further, the Kerala Joint Hindu Family (Abolition) Act, 1976 eliminated the legal conception of joint family property among the Hindus by replacing joint tenancies with ‘tenancies in common’. In the last few decades there has been a gradual shift in the understanding of women’s property rights in Kerala, especially among the major social groups in the state, both patrilineal and matrilineal (in Kerala, the major matrilineal social groups are the Nairs and the Ezhavas and the major patrilineal groups comprise the Nampoothiris, the Christians and the Muslims). Women’s property rights in patrilineal societies conventionally tended to be organized around marriage, in a range of practices that included the transfer of women, residence, dowry and exchange of gifts. These practices virtually denied women their inheritance rights. But unlike in patriarchal north Indian societies, women’s property rights in matrilineal societies in Kerala were clearly delinked from marriage, emerging instead from a birthright in the family property. Dowry, which is associated with patrilineal groups, is a social and economic phenomenon that denies women their property rights. Studies conducted by Praveena Kodoth clearly illustrate how the land in women’s names has been converted to dowry. Kodoth’s 2005 enquiry into land reforms in Kerala revealed that when OBC households received land, their status anxiety led to an increased seclusion of women as part of their attempts to gain social prestige. For the women, this now meant working on their spouse’s land and depending on their spouses for even minor needs instead of having their own wage, as the land titles were in the

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men’s name. More disturbingly, it eventually led to women’s families selling land acquired through reforms, to pay for huge dowries as a brideprice. However, dowry, in the form of gold and cash, rarely reaches the women’s hands and is spent immediately after marriage by the husband and in-laws. Ostentatious marriage of a daughter has often led many families into deep financial ruin due to indebtedness which necessitates the mortgaging and sale of property. Thus dowry, which was earlier linked to social sanction and regulation, has failed to retain its original characteristics. Until 1986, when the Supreme Court held that the Christians of Travancore and Cochin were to be governed by the provisions of the Indian Succession Act, 1925, they were governed by highly genderdiscriminatory laws. In fact, the Travancore Christian Succession Act,1916, has been described as an outcome of the expression of fear and anxiety on the part of the Christian community over certain decisions by the courts in Travancore applying the British Indian law for Christians to adjudicate on the rights of widows. The denial of women’s rights to property rested on ‘fears’ of domestic disharmony and ruin arising from frequent litigation and fragmentation of property. Under the Travancore Act, women were eligible to receive one fourth of the son’s share, or five thousand rupees (whichever was less) as stridhanam (dowry), and did not inherit paternal property. The Indian Succession Act, 1925, does not discriminate between the sexes in matters of intestate succession:“If daughters are given a share along with their brothers and the widow is allowed to have any claim whatever, except maintenance in the property of their husband, it would destroy the domestic tranquility, throw open the flood-gates of litigation, bringing all sorts of calamities and eventually ruin the community” (Tharakan, 1997: 125 citing ‘Original Appendix No. 1’, Dissenting Minute to the Christian Committee, c 1916). So, even though Mary Roy’s petition for Christian women’s equal inheritance land rights did get a favourable hearing from the Supreme Court to bring about amendment in the inheritance law, many women still continue to write off their inheritance either because they are pressured and manipulated, or else because they wish to maintain cordial family relationships with their natal homes. Among the Syrian Christians of Kerala, stridhanam (female wealth) is the sum of money that a woman brings with her at the time of marriage. It is not seen as a gift, but falls under the category of presentations. Symbolically, it must be seen as the severing of economic ties for a woman from her natal home and her incorporation into the conjugal household. The woman no longer has a share in her father’s property.

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Through the payment of stridhanam, a woman becomes affiliated to her husband’s family and church. That is, upon marriage a woman is not incorporated as an individual with rights equal to her husband. Rather she is incorporated as a wife, which is to say that she does not even have control over her stridhanam, to say nothing of any substantial rights in her husband’s family property. The Syrian Christian idea of dowry does not correspond to the notion of dowry as defined by Goody and Tambiah, who defined dowry as part of a financial or conjugal fund which passes down from holder to heir. Goody prefers to classify dowry under the category of ‘diverging devolution’, where familial property is transferred from father to daughter who becomes full heir, semi-heir or residual heir. However, Goody does refer to Yalman’s distinction between dowry and inheritance where dowry is the result of a bargain and has a specific intention of linking a daughter with a desirable man. Stridhanam is a woman’s share of her father’s property, and may be more than the sons receive, as happens in middle class families where the entire property may be sold or mortgaged in order to marry off the daughter. But usually it is less than the sons receive as inheritance when the father dies in the case of wealthy families who have large estates. Stridhanam also varies depending on the time and circumstance of the marriage. In the Syrian Christian family, stridhanam ideally comes under the category of pre-mortem inheritance (Visvanathan 111). However, the manipulative aspect has become empirically dominant, and money is used in order to contract marriages with desirable families. It is generally accepted that through such presentations, status may be consolidated and maintained, and avenues for upward mobility created, but then stridhanam loses the character of the gift or even of pre-mortem inheritance. The ‘spirit’ of the presentation demands that there be no question regarding its expenditure once money has changed hands. The woman has no control over her wealth, and while there is often suppressed violence, in the majority of cases women tend to accept the entailed subjugation. Among the Christians of Kerala, a wife’s rights are restricted to the right of maintenance from her husband’s estate. A separated woman had no place in Syrian Christian society (ibid, 112, Roy, 1999: 210, 213). Before the 1986 decision of the Supreme Court on Syrian Christian inheritance, women’s rights to paternal property were exhausted by the stridhanam. The obligation to provide stridhanam for a daughter at marriage is frequently a great financial strain on her parents as the presentations have to continue, although varying in nature even after marriage. Often, stridhanam takes on the character of a ‘groom-price’

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(Visvanathan 112), for the dowry brought by the woman is controlled not by her but by her husband and his kin. It is used by the husband’s family either to marry off their daughters or is invested in land or business over which the woman has no say. If ‘stridhanam’ is understood as a woman’s share of her father’s property, the indications are that it is lending itself to a process of disinheritance of women. And given the evidence of resistance from entrenched social interests, church and community, there does not seem to have been a dramatic departure from existing custom (Agarwal, 1994, Roy, 1999), though high rates of stridhanam go alongside the exercise of testation to safeguard patrimonial interests (Roy, 1999, Visvanathan, 1993: 146). Goody has argued that allocation of property, whether in money or land, always threatens the notion of patrimony. A balance must be maintained by what is given to the bride in order to be married, and a share of the estate which does not damage the interests of other siblings, thereby preserving extension of the family interests. On the other hand, disinheritance encourages the early break-up or mortgaging of the estate. The dominance of cash dowries tended to place control in the hands of men—the husband, but more often his father, since it is he who controls the property. The question of inheritance thus becomes most problematic when the father dies intestate and the brothers do not feel morally compelled to provide for their sisters. Among Indian Muslims, the inferior status of Muslim women in society is due to their being denied property rights and education. In preIslamic Arabic societies, women had no recognized status and had no property rights since they themselves were looked upon as property. But in Koranic times, women were assigned a share of the inheritance, thereby making a woman the mistress of her own property in which the husband had no right. Equality of men and women and non-discrimination on the basis of gender constitutes one of the vital human rights enshrined in international charters and in the constitution of India. In reality, however, Muslim women in India constitute one of the most deprived groups, owing to a socio-cultural ethos that assigns low status to women in general, as well as non-contextual male interpretations and applications of certain Quranic observations, and injunctions related to man-woman functional relations within the family concerning marriage, divorce, maintenance, and inheritance. In all matters outside the domain of the family, Muslim women are governed by the Common Indian law so do not suffer from any disability due to the traditional Islamic law’s male-dominated interpretations. However, it is the socio-educational backwardness of Muslim women that renders them incapable of securing their rights. But in

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Kerala, given its high literacy level, Muslim women, especially in south Kerala, are comparatively better off when compared with their counterparts in north India. Although the Muslim community today is predominantly patriarchal, a matrilineal system was practiced amongst the Mappillas of north Malabar. Earlier Islamic law was applied to the descent of property among the matrilineal Mappillas of north Malabar, where females inherited rights to property, but the Mappilla Marumakkatayam Act of the late 1930s provided individual rights to partition of the taravad (matrilineal joint family), and a Kerala amendment in 1963 brought the share of any member of a Mappilla taravad under the purview of Islamic law, while also substituting Muslim for Mappilla (Agarwal, 1994: 233). In contemporary Indian society, Muslim women’s inheritance rights among the patrilineal groups of south Malabar, Cochin and Travancore are generally on the lines of Islamic law, moderated by local custom, as with anywhere else in India. The practice of giving stridhanam at the marriage of a girl was customary among the patrilineal communities-the Christians, Muslims, and Nambudiris-but recently there has been a general visibility of dowry and the signs of its growing presence, even among groups that did not conventionally practice the dowry system among specific matrilineal groups like-the Tiyas, Mappillas, and Ezhavas (Gough 1961). This can be regarded as an important indicator of the direction of change of women’s property rights, although among the Ezhavas, dowry did not exhaust women’s inheritance rights. However, the custom varies widely among different groups and regions. Among the matrilineal Hindu groups, there has been over the past century a general shift to dowried, virilocal monogamous marriages (Osella and Osella, 2000: 85). While women’s bargaining position in their marital family could vary with the property they bring as dowry, even a large dowry is no guarantee of security. Up to at least the mid-1970s, women of the matrilineal group used to inherit some property (Gough 1952; Fuller, 1976). Puthenkulam’s (1977: 104) survey recorded a fairly even presence of dowry in the north (32.7 per cent), central (29.8 per cent) and south (24 per cent). Often, the rate of stridhanam varied according to socio-cultural factors including educational qualifications and the employment status of men and women, and factors of considerable importance such as a woman’s complexion and ‘beauty’ (Visvanathan 1993: 111, Osella and Osella 2000: 101). Dowries included a combination of cash, gold, land and consumer durables. Among the Ezhavas, the bulk of the dowry consisted of land given by the father, and also cash and gold. Though some notional distinction was made between land and gold to remain in the bride’s name and cash and goods

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going to the husband and his family, in practice most women lost control over the entire dowry, which is used to support the needs of the husband’s family. However, in the case of Ezhavas, one point of difference cited is that of public registration of the dowry paid and cash gifts received at the marriage of a girl with the SNDP to guard against loss in case of a breakup of the marriage. Even a Nair bride only has proof of her share of land via the NSS register. Today, property transfers are increasingly being made at the time of marriage of a girl and often there is an element of force associated with such demands. Even among the matrilineal Muslims there seems to be a gradual shift towards dowry, while patrilineal Muslims claim that they do not have control over dowry especially cash and sometimes gold and land. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Kerala ranks high among the Indian states in molestation and domestic violence, which includes dowry-related crime and dowry deaths (Mukherjee et al., 1999). A major factor associated with suicide attempts by women was marital disharmony resulting in domestic violence, mainly on account of dowry (cash/land/consumer goods). Customs that regulate women’s property rights have strong implications for their ability to claim ownership and exercise control over property, irrespective of favourable laws (Agarwal 1994). According to the Kerala Development Report of 2008 (417-18), the extent of land held (operational holdings) by men and women in Kerala, based on the Agricultural Census of 1995-96, shows wide disparity between men and women in the holding of operational units of land. Women hold less than a third of the number of area of operational holdings held by men. As the size of holdings increases, the women’s share of the number of holdings and area declines. Disparity becomes more pronounced in the case of area of holdings. In the over-ten hectare category, women hold less than ten per cent of the number, and less than five per cent of the area, of operational holdings. Recent research based on primary data has documented that women are increasingly taking over responsibility for management and cultivation of land, in addition to other family responsibilities, in the context of diversification of household incomes and the shift of male members from agricultural to other occupations through migration or otherwise (Morrison, 1997; Arun, 1999). Significantly, women actively involved in agriculture and animal husbandry continue to report themselves as housewives (Narayan, 2000). Besides these factors, what constrains women’s title and access to, and control over, property is women’s poor occupational profile in the state, which severely restricts their ability to acquire property.

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A study of women’s participation in the land market in a south Travancore highland village found that a much higher proportion of Nair women than men sold the land they inherited, and ‘migration due to marriage’ was stated as the reason for the sales (Varghese, 1988). This indicates a higher turnover of immovable property inherited by women consequent on patriarchal marriage and residence with their husband. Among the erstwhile matrilineal Ezhavas of Central Travancore, land was sold and the cash proceeds given to the husband as a form of dowry that is not usually under the control of the wife. In a survey of widows in selected areas of north and south India, Chen (2000) found that 67 per cent of the widows whom she surveyed in Kerala had inherited land from husbands as against only 27 per cent who had inherited land from parents. Thus, the anchoring of women’s inheritance rights in marriage reflects their dependent status and vulnerability within marriage. There is substantial evidence of the increasing practice of dowry payments at the time of marriage of girls across social and economic groups. Further, researches in Kerala found that 49 per cent of women with no property reported physical violence compared with only 7 per cent of women who did own property (Panda 2002). Single ownership rather than joint ownership of land is preferred, and is more prevalent among the higher socio-economic group, while among lower socio-economic groups joint ownership is also much more preferred, although women generally preferred single ownership. Much has been written about the ‘high status’ of women in Kerala and their central role, historically, in social development, but the same cannot be said of female work-participation rates. Even at the micro level of the family, women-especially-younger women-have very little power to make decisions, and with the rising visibility of gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence, mental ill-health manifested increasingly as suicide, and the rapid growth and spread of dowry and related crimes, indicate that women have internalized subordination, sustaining iniquitous gender relations within the household. Women often do not have any access or control over their assets whether in the form of land or house or any form of earnings. Further, women’s work participation rates are the lowest in the country, with only14 per cent working, and this lack of work also leads to economic dependence which further reduces their decisionmaking capacities. There are ample indications to prove that education alone has not enabled women to challenge gender relations. Neither did work by itself ensure women’s control over earnings or their ability to take ‘self interested’ decisions. Paradoxically, domestic violence and dowry deaths went alongside with rising levels of education.

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Sociological studies across India, found that south India, including Kerala, represented ‘greater freedom for women’ (Karve 1953), or greater female autonomy, which is defined as ‘the ability to manipulate one’s personal environment’ (Dyson and Moore 1983). Maybe this was due to the prevalence of matrilineal kinship among sections of the population in Kerala with its patterns of inheritance, marriage and post-marital residence that seemed to indicate greater decision-making power than for women in patrilineal families of north India. It therefore appeared that women in Kerala enjoyed a high status. However, studies which use access to land (women’s rights to land under specific kinship systems) as a measure of autonomy or empowerment, reflected the hollowness of such assumptions as it was seldom demonstrated how such access translated into actual control, and hence the power to make decisions. Moreover, autonomy, not easily measurable, could be severally constituted. Visaria’s (1996) measure of economic autonomy in terms of women’s access to, and control over, household income, suggested that women in Gujarat had higher levels of autonomy than those in Kerala, despite much lower levels of literacy. The recent National Family Health Survey, 199899 (IIPS 2000), which incorporated measures of autonomy for married women for the first time, also revealed that Kerala trailed Gujarat in terms of all the measures of autonomy household decision-making, freedom of movement and access to money. Poor women from all communities in Kerala suffer marital violence mainly due to male unemployment and alcohol consumption. They also collectively blame dowry for violence in marriage. Empowerment alludes to recognition by women of the ideology that legitimizes and sustains male domination (Batliwala 1994). However, if rights in property customarily enjoyed by women become eroded over time, and women’s work expands only slowly or into selective and relatively lower-paying occupations, their control over resources is weakened, as well as their relative position within the household. It is against this background that I examined the land rights of women in Kerala. To facilitate my study, I conducted a case study of Pathanamthitta District using a two-pronged strategy. The first one was by using a structured questionnaire for 500 households selected on a random basis from different parts of Pathanamthitta. The second one was by collecting PV (land ownership) data from the Panchayat Offices of the five taluks in Pathanamthitta district. As the youngest district in the state of Kerala, Pathanamthitta comprises three natural divisions-the lowland, the midland and the highland. Fifty per cent of the land in Pathanamthitta district is covered with

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forest. Agriculture is the main occupation and about 75 per cent of the people are dependent upon it for their livelihood. The district has five taluks: Ranni, Kozhencherry, Adoor, Thiruvalla and Mallapally. Each taluk comprises a number of villages, and there are 68 villages in Pathanamthitta district. The structured questionnaire used for the sample study consists of 10 questions. They were distributed among widely dispersed localities in Pathanamthitta district. The responses by women to the four main questions (index 1) were classified into 3 groups based on religion-Hindu, Muslim and Christians. This was further subdivided into employed and unemployed women.

3

2

1

Qn. No

Should women have Land Rights? Do you have land rights? Is the land in your name?

Questions

Chapter Three

06 19 45

83

67

38

49

70

112

77

53

08

No

Yes

Yes

No

Unemployed

Employed

Hindus

07

33

59

Yes

56

32

05

No

Employed

Christians

09

43

82

Yes

79

43

05

No

Unemployed

15

24

33

Yes

21

12

03

No

Employed

Muslims

Land Rights of Women in Kerala (Sample Survey—500)

Hindus–209 Christians–151 Muslims–140

Table 1

66

34

69

103

Yes

70

35

01

No

Unemployed

Father 22 24 11 11 10 09

Husband 49 85 54 62 38 77

E

U

E

U

E

U

03

--

04

01

05

01

Son

--

--

02

03

08

09

Mother

03

--

01

02

--

06

Co-owner

The results gained by examining the PV (land ownership) register from the panchayat offices of the five taluks in Pathanamthitta district is cited in Table 3.

*E-Employed *U—Unemployed

Muslims

Christians

Hindus

Table 2

Q.4 In whose name is the land?

Women’s Land Rights in Kerala 67

156

174

123

206

Kozhencherry

Mallapally

Tiruvalla

Adoor

128

45

51

98

41

Women

(Total survey sample: 500)

123

Men

Hindus

Ranny

Taluks

Table 3

68

08

07

07

15

10

Joint Ownership

132

269

195

179

217

Men

20

47

35

33

38

Women

Christians

01

04

11

17

49

Joint Ownership

Ownership of Land

Chapter Three

04

01

24

02

15

Men

01

04

03

--

06

Women

Muslims

--

--

---

--

01

Joint Ownership

Women’s Land Rights in Kerala

69

The above data was collected by examining the PV Record (Land Ownership Register) between 2009-2011 of Angadi village in Ranni taluk, Chennierkara (Onnukkal) village in Kozhencherry taluk, Perumpatty village in Mallapally taluk, Niranam village in Thiruvalla taluk and Kodumon village in Adoor taluk. Christians and Hindus predominate in the population in almost all the five villages of the five taluks taken up for survey. From the results of the questionnaire and from the survey of the PV register, it is clear that women in Kerala are denied land rights. Among Hindus, women who own land are mostly from the Nair caste and a few from the Ezhava caste. But there is a general shift from matrilineal to patriarchal practices even amongst them. Christians and Muslims being predominantly patriarchal vehemently oppose, or are generally reluctant to concede, land rights to their women. Further, twenty women belonging to different religions, and from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds were interviewed to ascertain their opinions about women’s land rights and factors that hinder their implementation and what could be done to rectify the imbalance in power as far as land rights were concerned. From their responses, it is clear that although almost all women are in favour of land rights for women, religious and socio-cultural practices are so ingrained in their psyche that they are not ready to demand change or assert their rights. Even educated employed women do not dare to assert their rights, fearing domestic disharmony. Many felt that religious custom and social norms, as well as the rigid mindset of society, were the greatest hindrance to women claiming their land rights. A few women who were employed had empowered themselves by purchasing land in their own names. Many expressed the view that joint ownership could be a possible solution since being co-partners was better than having no claim. In the course of my sample survey, I encountered many women whose husbands spoke negatively about women acquiring land as it was against their custom and culture. Even women who were bank managers, college professors, doctors, IT professionals, or teachers, had only this to say: “My husband is totally against my owning land. Even though I earn so much, I have no right.” It was no different in the case of Kudumbashree workers, women tailors, clerks, or even housewives who claimed they had no land or property rights. But there were a few exceptions where the husband proudly stated that their land was co-owned. What was startling, however, was the reaction of some educated women who said they saw no need for women to own land, especially since they had brought dowry and were

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therefore legally entitled to a share in the marital property and hence there was no need to have independent land rights or to have control over it. Given below are a few extracts of the narratives collected in course of the interview. A Christian woman said: “I wish I had owned some property. Although my husband gives me everything, who knows about the future? I do not earn nor am I qualified for a job. If anything happens, I have absolutely no kind of support. My husband laughs at my fears. But when I ask him to transfer the property in my name or co-jointly, he ignores my pleas. How I wish I had some earning or property in my name.”

Yet another woman bemoans her lack of property rights: “I have no property in my own name… My husband takes all major decisions in the house…”

A Christian unemployed woman had this to say: “Women who do not own property of their own or do not earn a regular income are dependent on men. They lack decision-making ability and do not protest or raise their voice against injustice. A propertied woman or an employed woman will be more confident and will not depend on her husband financially.”

A Nair Hindu woman shared her views like this: “I think it is very good for women to own property as it gives them autonomy to decide about the household and future. I have a right to the property and the house is in my name. So we are able to save rent. My husband is very happy that I have this property, and he respects me. He involves me in all decisions.”

A Muslim woman had this to say: “Women with property will have less marital conflicts, and men will consult them in decisions.”

However, another Muslim woman had this to say: “Woman has to be a very good house manager. She should care and look after children and elders in the family. This is more important than property or equal status in husband’s family.”

A Christian widow claimed:

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“Land has given me greater power and security in the family. I have greater influence over decisions in the family, as I manage the land. It has provided me with opportunities to invest and has provided greater financial security to my family.”

A Hindu Nair woman having marital problems and estranged from her husband stated that: “I have income from my property and therefore I do not need to depend on him for my needs.”

As for security derived from having property rights, this is what some of the women had to say: “A woman is afraid that the husband will abandon her one day, or will throw her out from his house. If the house and land is in the woman’s name, she can ask him to leave.” (Hindu Nair woman) “Since women have multiple responsibilities, having land and house in woman’s name will help them from having to go out and do wage labour. They can start some petty business and even if the husband leaves her one day, she can maintain herself.” (Muslim woman) “Property is a symbol of status in husband’s house; it provides social security for the woman.” (Hindu Ezhava) “I think it is very good for women to own property since it helps in times of need and gives confidence to take major decisions in life. As is known, all major decisions in life are economic, and money is crucial for one’s well being. If there is property one can use it for any purpose,” (Christian woman) “Inherited property provides a woman more independence and selfdetermination than a woman without property. Both property and earnings from my job have provided me with the ability to voice my opinion.” (Hindu Ezhava)

A few women also mentioned that the property they owned contributed to the economic security of their marital family. Some propertied women claimed that they not only managed their own property but also their husband’s, who were employed abroad. From the above-mentioned narratives, it is clear that owning property gives a woman status and protection in her marital family. But even in situations where the option of joint ownership of land existed, women expressed the desire to own a piece of land in their own names, i.e in

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single titles. Although women did not rule out the benefits of joint land ownership, where husbands would not be able to sell or mortgage the land without their permission or knowledge, they preferred to have independent control and rights over property. Everyone wishes to own their own land, so why not women? Land is indeed a scarce precious resource and it may not be possible for everyone to own one’s own land but when women form more than half of the population and work as hard as men for daily sustenance, if not more, why is it that they own only 1 per cent of the land? As Virginia Woolf asked in her famous essay, A Room of One’s Own: “Why are women so poor?” Why is it that even education or a high income has not been able to guarantee women’s right or control over land? Land is the most valued form of property. Land is power. Independent land access sets into motion a process of social and political empowerment. So without power and property there is no real empowerment.

CONCLUSION

The struggle for land rights for a woman is a struggle to assert her identity, which forms the very essence of her womanhood. A woman has multiple identities in society and these identities influence the experience of subordination, the sense of loss of identity, and as a result, the very nature of struggle. Society recognizes her multiple roles as long as they are within the norms established. But for a woman to pursue her choices renders her selfish, uncaring and individualistic. The key of finding oneself as a person is to therefore stay within the system and fight it (Rao 4). This very act of resistance leads to a sense of being, and also begins transforming the system itself. There are scores of counter-arguments against “giving” women a share in land and property. Firstly, that she will get married and “go away”. Men also get married, go away, and set up home independently or go away in search of jobs. If the son’s physical absence has never been an excuse to disinherit or deprive him, why this excuse when it comes to women? Besides, when a son marries into a fatherless/sonless family, his wife and mother-in-law often expect the son in-law to move in with them for security and convenience while he assumes that he will gain access to their property. A second set of arguments is that land reform is the answer, not the sharing of existing small-holdings with sons and daughters as it would lead to further fragmentation. Globally, land is a key element in the identities of people. Many of the struggles for recognition begin with land, which takes on multiple meanings. For a woman, land means more than a few paddy fields; it means her recognition as an individual, with rights in the community and in the household. While the original demand for land and property rights began with the demand for gender equality, today it has assumed a greater dimension and is now seen as a key strategy to enhancing food production and food security, in a situation when men are often absent from the rural areas. While earlier women were labelled home-makers, now they are categorized as producers. But inheritance laws have created a disjuncture between production and reproduction by not merely denying women rights to land, but also by questioning their very identities as human beings. So struggles over land are not just about material change or redistribution of a resource, but also about shifts in power relations between different groups,

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about asserting one’s identity. The assertion by women is a demand for recognition, of being valued, but unfortunately, it is often construed as a challenge to male authority. Land is a necessary condition for a woman’s aspiration, especially in the rural context, but this alone is not enough. Social acceptance and legitimization is necessary for the use and control of land and realization of one’s identity. Without social acceptance, even women with rights to land are unable to make them functional. Further, even though the new land reform guidelines prioritize women in all land distribution programmes, comparatively few women have actually received land. On the other hand, women who hold title to land in their own name prize the security with which the land endows them. Even if they are not able to work the land themselves, due to age or social restrictions, women claim that having a piece of land in their own name gives them something to contribute to the family and ensures the well-being of their family. Research shows that there is a general awareness among women of their rights and of the rights granted to widows, daughters and sisters under the written inheritance laws, but these rights are not frequently exercised as they are conditioned to be the “good” sister, mother, widow, daughter-inlaw or wife. Often, it is the abandoned and separated women, facing a crisis of livelihood in the absence of land, who initiate advocacy in favour of women’s inheritance of natal property as daughters, whereas it seems that married women prefer staking claims in the marital property, but that is only when their marriage breaks up or when gender relations are precarious. It is well known that women in India are rarely landowners despite their high levels of involvement in agricultural production and dependence on agriculture for their livelihoods. The reason why women are not landowners is because very few rural women own either agricultural land or the houses they live in. It is also true that women with high income levels or even propertied women have no independent control or access to land mainly because of the biased inheritance laws and custom practices amongst the various religious groups in India. Research shows that people’s capacity to access and use land is important for economic growth and poverty reduction. Rural women, NGOs, policy-makers and researchers are all aware of the multiple benefits possible from granting women secure rights to land, which include drastically enhanced security, increased and dependable income, the ability to access credit and government programmes, and more leverage and respect within the household. Therefore, remedying the exclusion of the majority of women from access to, and control of, rural

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land in India can be one of the most significant steps that could be taken towards enhancing the country’s rural livelihoods. Governments have a responsibility to establish systems which ensure access to land for everyone in society, including women. Gender-neutral statutory law on land and its interplay with customary, religious and other social norms can therefore have a significant impact on women’s rights to access land and environmental resources. Hence, innovative and radical approaches to land and environmental resources are required to change the prevailing conditions. It is generally felt that, rather than focusing on ownership of land for its own sake, the roles that individuals play with regard to the land and environmental resources should determine rights to land. Such a focus would shift the locus of land and control of environmental resources’ from titular male household heads to the tenders of land who are mainly women. The key role of women in the economy needs to be recognized and supported at the individual level, and not just at the household level. While policies and programmes appear to carry within them the potential to satisfy women’s needs claims, they are biased in favour of women in virtuous roles, rather than separated or abandoned women, who are construed as deviant. Even State practice continues to remain male-biased. Therefore, what is needed is a huge ideological shift, for one of the major problems with state policy is the absence of understanding, of ‘thinking’ that treats women as homogeneous, and subordinate or backward. Women’s need for land must be understood from the point of view of women’s rights to a dignified life. Over the years, concerns about women’s access to, control over, and ownership of, land and resources have been raised at different as well as inter-related levels. Hence, the government must see to it that women do not face any discrimination in exercising their rights to land due to their caste, race, age, religion and ethnicity. Clearly, women’s land-use priorities are different from those of men, and since the majority of the poor masses hardly manage to have land of their own, separate land for women is a non-issue. In such a scenario, what can be done is to focus on joint titles of landed property. The concept of co-ownership of marital property (known in many western countries as common property) is a means of addressing the unequal ownership of assets within marriage. Under most co-ownership systems, the husband and wife own an undivided one-half interest in the property acquired during marriage, unless the property is a spouse’s separate property obtained prior to the marriage, or received by one spouse as a result of gift or inheritance during the marriage. A co-ownership system could give the spouses a joint interest in any dowry received and

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prevent a husband from disinheriting a wife since he can only control his half share of the marital property. One of the most contested debates is on the issues of whether women should seek individual or joint title to land. Proponents of individual title consider it the most useful to women. They claim that individual title will provide women with the flexibility to make decisions about the land, and women with individual title can explore alternative arrangements for the cultivation and management of the land. Individual title advocates also point to the limitations of joint title. On the other side of the debate, those arguing for joint title note that it provides women with the resources to be able to invest in the land, so that it may preserve plots at a sustainable size, and will also protect women from seizure of land by their male relatives. These champions of joint title recognize its limitations but consider joint title for women an achievable objective. Joint title, they feel, is more socially acceptable because it does not appear to break up the family unit through individual property rights. Joint title may have limited value, but it is a step toward reducing gender inequality in land ownership. However, there is no evidence that women with joint title have any more control over the land than those with no title and despite government policies promoting joint titling, little joint titling of government-granted land has taken place. Bina Agarwal in her seminal work ‘A Field of One’s Own’ therefore demands independent land rights for women, which excludes joint titles with men. She makes it clear that legal ownership of land without effective control over its use and the disposal of its produce may not leave a person better off than if he or she had control without legal ownership. According to her findings, independent rights would be preferable to joint titles to husbands for several reasons: one, with joint titles it could prove difficult for women to gain control over their share in case of marital break ups; two, women would also be less in a position to escape from a situation of marital conflict or violence; three, wives may have different land-use priorities from their husbands, which they would be in a better position to act upon with independent land rights; four, women with independent rights would be better placed to control the produce; and five, with joint titles the question of how the land would subsequently be inherited could prove to be a contentious one (Agarwal 1994: 20). She agrees, however, that having joint titles with husbands would be better for a women than having no land rights at all, although many of the advantages of having one’s own land cannot be attained by joint titles alone. She further argues that the case for women having independent rights in arable land rests on several interconnected arguments like welfare,

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efficiency, equality and empowerment. In the welfare argument, it is implied that rights in land could reduce women’s own and, more generally, the household’s risk of poverty and destitution. In a context of limited non-farm opportunities, land serves as a security against poverty. Moreover, for vulnerable groups like widows and the elderly, landownership enhances their bargaining power within the household. In the efficiency argument, it is claimed that, owing to long-term male emigration, many households in rural India are being increasingly femaleheaded, and the sole responsibility for organizing cultivation and ensuring family subsistence rests on these females, who do not have titles to the land they cultivate. Widows are cultivating plots given to them out of the joint family estates (as part of their inheritance claims to their deceased husband’s lands) but the plots are still in their in-laws’ names. Again, tribal women cultivating communal land rarely hold titles to their fields, which are typically given out by the State only to male farmers. In such situations, titling women and providing infrastructural support could help increase output by increasing their access to credit and to technology and information on productivity-increasing agricultural practices. Land titles could make it easier for women to adopt improved agricultural technology and thereby increase overall production. In the case of female inheritance, ownership rights can co-exist with a variety of cultivation arrangements. For instance, women owners who do not cultivate the land themselves can lease it out to male relatives or other male tenants. While the welfare and efficiency arguments are concerned with women, having some land in absolute terms, especially in situations of poverty, the equality and empowerment arguments are concerned with women’s position relative to men, and particularly with women’s ability to challenge male oppression within the home and in the wider society (Agarwal 38). The dominant institution of land ownership and control in rural India is the household where male dominance, traditional gender roles and skill limitations of women are barriers that are not so easy to challenge or overcome. Thus for women to stake claims to the land, alternative institutions that own and cultivate land must be created. Any number of non-household-based institutions of land ownership and cultivation are possible: individual ownership with joint investment, individual ownership with joint cultivation, group ownership and group cultivation schemes, and group leasing and cultivation management programmes. Through these types of arrangements, women’s actual control over land can be increased and the assets attendant to that control realized-all without direct challenge to existing power bases. Through interventions of the government and NGOs, individuals and their households, and ultimately whole

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communities, can enjoy the benefits flowing from the land as the result of an alternative institutional design for land management that includes methods for accessing, controlling, and managing land. Questions regarding the impact of various methods of increasing women’s access to land remain at the level of highly academic discussions without much supporting data, particularly from India. Research results provide a foundation for policy consensus-building and advocacy, which in turn can identify appropriate players and projects for development and implementation of NGO activities. Field research in selected communities in one or more states will go a long way toward providing the missing foundation. The rural poor are among India’s least educated. They are often isolated from independent media sources and rely on information supplied by local officials and panchayat members. So at the village level, India’s panchayat system, by drawing its power from the panchayat raj institutions (PRIs), can support and facilitate the rural poor’s attainment of its livelihood objectives, including secure access to land, although they cannot implement land reforms. However, since the panchayat may be the only channel through which rural communities receive information about laws and policy, the need for education of the panchayat members is critical. Similarly, legal aid services can provide a substantive and procedural link between legislation and livelihoods. Legal aid clinics can advise the rural poor of their land rights and interests, investigate claims, mediate disputes, and facilitate resolution of cases. Through these types of services, legal aid has the potential to give the poor actual access to the assets to which they are legally entitled. But the vast majority of India’s poor, and particularly its rural poor, do not have access to legal advice and representation. Legal aid can be offered to educate all levels of stakeholders regarding land rights and specific issues of interest to a state or community. But legislative changes do not themselves create real rights; technical land ownership does not translate into control of the land nor of any assets that flow from such ownership. Since legislation and policy pronouncements seldom penetrate the surface of rural livelihoods, they are ultimately impotent against the undertow of the established power structures inherent in most rural Indian households and villages. To date, the patriarchal currents running through rural lives and institutions of local governance have proved far more influential and persistent than any law or policy. Interventions hoping for genuine change in the extent to which women control land must be directed at the multiple, interrelated institutions (political, legal, religious,

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and social) that have established and continue to reflect and reaffirm the patriarchal ideology that dominates India’s rural society. Therefore to address the gender inequities in access to, and control of, land effectively, the problem must be confronted at the level of institutional control of land. There no doubt still exists a vast gap between law and its implementation. A number of factors constrain women from exercising their legal claims, including patrilocal post-marital residence and village exogamy; strong opposition from male kin; the social construction of gender needs and roles; the dominant view that men are the breadwinners and women the dependent; the low level of female education; and male bias and dominance in administrative, judicial, and other decision-making bodies at all levels in addition to the gaps that exist between the central government’s policy directives and the shape given at the state/province level. But more importantly is the belief that the land distributed to women will further decrease farm sizes and fragment cultivated holdings which in turn will reduce agricultural productivity. Gender equality is a measure of a just society, in which equality of rights over productive resources would be an important part. Although the constitution of India promises equality as a fundamental right, there exists a vast gap between the stated principles and state practice, especially in the gender bias that exists as far as laws concerning landed property are concerned. Research shows that women are not only denied land and property rights but are also under-represented in institutions that deal with land and land resources. Few women have land registered in their names. Equality in land rights is an indicator of women’s economic empowerment. Therefore, making access to land and environmental resources equitable is one way to achieve development and empowerment. Further steps must be taken to ensure that the wife’s name be added to land documents that were previously allocated solely in the name of the husband. Similarly, there must be legal inclusion of women as joint owners of purchased land, and all outstanding land deeds/pattas should be issued jointly to husband and wife. In addition, adopting a change in marital property law to provide for co-ownership of property acquired during marriage by both spouses; ensuring government-allocated land in the joint names of husband and wife or in the independent name of the woman; granting widows the sole right to inherit the family house and land, especially for those without other means of support; making provision for separated and divorced women to gain access and control over their land, and in the case of government-allocated land the permission to sell it; and providing grants and/or subsidized loans for women to purchase land of their own and thereby become landowners are

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some of the steps that can be implemented to ensure gender equality and secure for women their rights to land and property. In the final analysis, it is clear that the majority of women in India are denied rights to land and property. Even though the Constitution of India guarantees equal rights to all citizens, the reality is different. Laws need to be implemented effectively to secure women’s equal land and property rights. Further, it can be seen that land reform is not merely a sufficient, but a necessary, condition for poverty eradication. Women’s land needs must be understood from the point of view of women’s rights to a dignified life. This can be achieved only if there is a change in people’s mindsets. Therefore, a social reform movement is necessary which will create increased awareness of laws among all citizens. This can be done by sensitizing the judiciary, administrators and legislators about the implementation of laws in letter and spirit and bringing in amendments of legal provisions on inheritance. Similarly strengthening the administrative machinery can resolve the issue of gender inequality by making it an integral component of macro-economic policies and growth processes in the public-political domain. All such measures will certainly make a difference. The struggle for rights by women must be viewed as a struggle against injustice and inequality, and not against the male sex. Equal rights can be ensured only when men and women have attained the same level of consciousness. Further dealing with land as a purely technical or legal issue is indeed futile, as it is a bearer of social identities and gender ideologies framing particular notions of masculinities and femininities. Land has different meaning for different people, for instance, as an individual, status-giving resource versus a shared, livelihood-supporting resource. Thus, the struggle for land signifies much more than a struggle for an economic resource. For men, it provides the legitimacy of ‘provider’ expectations and the symbolic construction of land as a male form of property, whereas for women a shift to individualism is what claims to land seem to signify. Contestation of land is then driven not only by physical need but also by the ideological construction of gender roles and responsibilities. Women’s claims to land rights are thus not just a struggle over a physical asset, but also a struggle over identities, notions of masculinity and femininity, poverty and marginality, authority and prestige.

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