Indian Feminisms Law Patriarchies and Feminism in India

Feminist movements in India have posed challenges to established patriarchal institutions such as the family, and to dominant social values and structures, most significantly in the arena of legal interventions in the areas of violence against women. Feminists have intervened in the area of law in at least three ways. One, to expose the working of patriarchal controls and structures within law, for instance, critiquing civil marriage and divorce laws that extend more rights to men than women. Two, to unpack the plural ways in which law operates, including offering some redress to women in situations of domestic violence and finally, to campaign to extend rights to women, such as campaigns against sexual assault and rape. As a movement that has challenged hegemonic notions of the ‘Indian family’, detractors have constructed Indian feminism as a distinctly western phenomenon. Therefore Indian feminists have been forced to confront and combat claims of being ‘westernised’ both from the state and from sections of civil society, including by right wing Hindu fundamentalist forces as being alienated from the ‘Indian’ realities of family structures.