Women’s Rights : India Suit: A Threat to Tradition

Lata Mittal is one of 11 children--five daughters and six sons--born into a wealthy shopkeeper’s family here.

Her mother was deeply religious. When Lata was 12, her parents decided to send her to an ashram, a Hindu religious retreat. By sending Lata and two other daughters to the ashram, the parents felt they had fulfilled their responsibility to them. In a Christian culture, it would be the same as sending a girl to a convent.

Lata was left for 10 years in the ashram, where her duties included scrubbing the cooking utensils. She was prohibited from reading anything but religious texts. She had no money. Instead of giving her the jewelry and marriage dowry provided by custom to Hindu daughters, her parents bought ornaments for the ashram.

Mother Outraged

One day Lata Mittal left the ashram and went home. Her father had died and her brothers, in accordance with Hindu law, were managing the business. She was given a room in one of the family residences but none of the brothers would speak to her. Her mother was outraged that she had returned.

“My mother told me when I came from the ashram that I should become a prostitute, and she asked my brothers to evict me,” she said.

After the 10 years in the ashram, she said, “I could hardly remember the alphabet.” But she borrowed books from neighbor families. She won a scholarship, and was graduated from college. She got a job as a clerk in the New Delhi Post Office and was paid a salary equivalent to about $75 a month.

Now, in a case that promises to shake the foundations of Hindu family life in India, she has sued her brothers for a share of the family properties. More important, in a country where most civil cases take 10 years to reach even the lowest courts, the Indian Supreme Court has agreed to hear her case this month before a special panel of three judges.

Promise of Equal Rights

This quick action by the Supreme Court follows another far-reaching case, involving a woman’s right to hold private property separate from her husband. Feminists and experts on the law as it affects women hope the court will fulfill India’s longstanding promise to give women equal legal rights.

India’s century-long struggle for independence from Britain was, in its later stages at least, a model of sexual equality. Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led the independence movement, insisted that the emancipation of India was not possible without the emancipation of women.

After independence, in 1947, a women was included in the first Cabinet of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and equal rights for women were written into the constitution. For 16 years, Indira Gandhi was India’s prime minister.

But if India was constitutionally liberated, its principal and dominant religions (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism) were not. Hindu and Muslim custom and law pervade India’s legal system and its local institutions.

A woman can be prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, but for all practical purposes she is excluded from the village panchayat , the five-man ruling council that governs local life.

Traditionally, land is passed from father to son to grandson. An unborn male child has more legal right to his family’s property than the woman carrying him. After marriage, a woman’s personal property becomes her husband’s.

Except in the relatively minute urban middle class, women in India continue to be a terribly oppressed group.

‘Unending Drudgery’

Madhu Kiswar, a feminist editor in New Delhi, has written: “Even though for an overwhelming majority of Indian women life is characterized by unending drudgery and powerlessness, there is a very strong belief among the ideologically powerful urban elite that India won the battle of equality long ago.”

What makes Lata Mittal’s lawsuit important, along with the earlier Supreme Court decision involving the personal property of women, is that they both deal with the most elemental sources of power in India--land and family wealth.

Although India is technically a secular state, the legal system makes many concessions to religion. Also, the laws governing individuals vary according to their religion.

The Hindu Succession Act of 1956 was approved in an attempt to remedy some of the inequities in the distribution of property, and two of its key provisions lie at the heart of Hindu family life. Lata Mittal’s case attacks these two provisions.

The first states that after the death of the male head of family, the ancestral property--land, residences and other shared holdings acquired over the years--is to be administered by a partnership of male heirs, with the senior male acting as manager. The women of the family have no legal say in what is done with the property.

Power of the Unborn Male

A grandson or great-grandson still unborn at the time of the death of the head of family is considered a member of this partnership, though his mother is not.

This section of the Indian law represents one of the most sacred elements of Hindu law, but Lata Mittal will argue that, as her family’s oldest child still living at home, she should be the manager of the family partnership.

She is also challenging the other key provision, which holds that a woman, though entitled to a room or rooms in the family home, may not partition off or sell her portion of the home. This effectively prevents a woman from personally owning a share of the family’s residential properties.

Although the Mittal family has been embarrassed by the publicity surrounding the case, Lata’s brothers are making a legal fight of it. A younger brother, Jagvir, said: “In a Hindu united family there is no right of property for the woman. She is taking this action only for the harassment of the brothers.”

The brothers also see themselves as guardians of a larger issue, involving their religion and the customs of the Hindu culture.

‘Disintegration of Family’

“If you make the change she wants,” said Jagvir, a law student at Delhi University, “I think there would be a social revolution in northern India. It would lead to the disintegration of the family, because every woman would be filing suits. There would be much disruption and . . . danger to peace. Peace is the purpose of the law.”

Feminists believe that the right of Indian women to inherit and hold property is at the heart of women’s liberation from the near-servitude of village life. Studies of villages show that nearly 70% of the work is done by women and children. Women are usually responsible for cooking, fetching water, rearing children, cleaning and cultivating.

The unequal division of labor even extends to construction sites and other workplaces. For example, a swimming pool was put in not long ago at the American community club for diplomats and other U.S. citizens, and the work was carried out by a crew that included women as well as men.

Men generally did the digging at the site but the women did virtually all the other heavy work, carrying great loads of dirt and rock in baskets on their heads. The work was done in full view of diners behind picture windows of the club restaurant, yet it caused hardly any comment.

At construction sites all over India, and in rice paddies and mustard fields, women do most of the work. Nothing is likely to change this, unless women win the right to own and maintain property.

Husband Gets Property

“Even when the daughter does manage to get property from her father, it is usually handed over to her husband,” the editor Madhu Kiswar said. “The question is, how do you get in a position where the property is actually handed over to the woman?”

The Supreme Court took a giant step in that direction last month, Kiswar and others say.

One of the biggest problems in Indian family life involves the dowry demanded by the groom’s family. Although the dowry has been outlawed in India, it continues to be a factor in most marriages, particularly in Hindu families. And often the new bride is abused by greedy in-laws hoping to persuade her to come up with more dowry money.

Once the dowry has been exhausted, the bride’s family drained of its resources, the wife is sometimes thrown out, driven to suicide, even killed. Every day, Indian newspapers carry stories about young women who have “accidentally” died in flames in their kitchens.

In its decision last month, the Supreme Court ruled that whatever property a woman takes into marriage, or is given specifically to her during the marriage, remains hers if the marriage is dissolved.

This case involved a woman named Pratibha Rani, who in 1972 married a Kashmir businessman. They had two children. At the time of the marriage, she had a dowry of about $6,000 in gold jewelry and silver. Her husband abused her throughout the marriage and, after eight years, beat her and abandoned her.

Ruling Against Husband

She sued to recover her dowry, but her husband contended it was now his. The court ruled that she had a right to her property and that the husband could be found guilty of criminal breach of trust for keeping it.

The idea that a Hindu woman, even after marriage, maintains some personal property is revolutionary. Theoretically, this gives her much greater leverage in the relationship, and ultimately it may become a factor in the continuing effort to prevent women from being killed over demands for their dowries.

After the court’s decision, an anti-dowry leader named Subhadra Butalia said in a magazine interview:

“Nobody takes such issues seriously till they come across women like Pratibha Rani, being buffeted from pillar to post, from law courts to police stations, only to retrieve property that all along belonged to them. Their lives will perhaps become a little easier because of such enlightened and radical judgments.”