Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India (6 page)

Visions of national and group culture influenced the social reform proposals of anticolonial nationalists and postcolonial cultural policies. There was considerable contention over postcolonial social reform amidst the hegemony of nationalist discourse. Conservative nationalists, some of whom were represented in postcolonial regimes, resisted many reform proposals in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. Such conservatives dominated other postcolonial regimes, such as those of Syria, Lebanon, and Malawi, and these regimes did not attempt major social reforms. The disagreements among nationalists over social reform extended across the colonial and postcolonial periods in many societies, and thus did not derive mainly from attitudes toward colonial state agency. Rather, they were based on alternative understandings of the cultures and desirable courses of the nation and its constituent groups, and on the links of specific nationalist organizations and tendencies with particular social groups.

Drawing from Chatterjee the understanding that postcolonial cultural politics and policy were often framed in terms of modernity and authenticity, I address the following questions that he did not: Under what conditions did postcolonial states introduce social reforms? What determined the approaches states took to recognize difference and promote culturally inflected forms of modernity? Various public actors developed understandings of the forms of modernity appropriate for particular colonial and postcolonial societies based on precolonial indigenous traditions, colonial knowledge about local society,
forms of ongoing cultural mobilization, and earlier social changes in the modern West. They used such understandings to frame social reforms as based on aspects of local culture, and thus to counter conservative efforts to discredit reform for causing cultural deracination. This study identifies certain understandings of indigenous forms of modernity influential in India and other former colonies, and sketches their influence over personal law.

Understandings of the forms of modernity appropriate for a nation, region, or cultural group emerged in various colonial and postcolonial societies, “internal colonies” such as Scotland, Catalonia, and Quebec, and other societies considered less developed when their links to other world regions increased (such as Italy, Ottoman Turkey, Russia, Japan, China, the southeastern United States, and Brazil in the later half of the nineteenth century). These models encompassed aspects of the political economy (particularly the forms of state engagement in the economy, types of property rights, and patterns of property and income distribution), state formation (such as the nature of the bureaucracy and the military, the extent of state centralization, the forms of political representation, the character of state-society links, and the patterns of state engagement with religion), and public culture (such as the public roles of religion and features of the languages of mass communication, public ritual, and everyday life). Their authors thus did not only mark the distinction of their societies (especially from more developed societies), make claims to sovereignty, and build culturally rooted social projects within the “spiritual realm,” as Chatterjee characterized it. Intellectuals, cultural and political mobilizers, and policy makers articulated such visions because they felt that viable strategies of economic development, state building, and cultural formation needed to take account of crucial features of the local society, and wished to frame their projects as culturally authentic. These understandings influenced the patterns of formation of polities and political economies, forms of secularization and religious practice, and types of nationalism, politicized ethnicity, and recently constructed traditions.
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These models varied in the social spheres to which they paid greatest attention. Some emphasized the need for the state to intervene in the economy more and in a different manner in later-developing societies than it had in previously industrialized societies, to enable economic growth, stabilization, redistribution, and poverty alleviation. They prescribed varied forms of state
intervention such as the establishment of tariff barriers for infant industries, the easier provision of investor credit, the development of infrastructure, the direction of investment into desired sectors, the maintenance of peasant and artisanal production, the promotion of small industrial firms, state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, and state ownership of much of agriculture and industry. Alexander Gerschenkron emphasized the distinctive features of these visions and their consequences for policy and economic change in Europe, and his lead was followed by scholars of state-led industrialization in East Asia such as Chalmers Johnson, Peter Evans, and Alice Amsden. Christopher Hill highlighted how important actors linked such economic strategies to narratives of national history.
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Political leaders like Lee Kuan Yew popularized aspects of these accounts, and connected them to features of religious culture.

Various intellectuals and political elites in colonial societies drew on the ideas developed earlier in Central and Eastern Europe and East Asia, added the claims that colonial rule had hindered industrialization and incorporated colonized societies into the world economy on a subordinate basis, and argued on these bases for building postcolonial developmental states. Moreover, they felt that postcolonial states needed to give special attention to promoting national cohesion and cultural decolonization, managing ethnic, religious, and racial conflict, and maintaining or changing the social structure. Such arguments were deployed in favor of the retention of collective land ownership tied to lineage power and customary law in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia; the redistribution of land from Europe an settlers to indigenous groups in various settler societies; and the maintenance of existing forms of the division of labor (especially in agriculture) or a return to imagined precolonial political economies in various colonies. Many important actors believed that the predominantly non-Christian religious cultures of much of the Middle East and Asia were important reasons to craft distinctive social projects, emphasizing either specific religions (particularly Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) or the common features that they saw in the different popular religious cultures of their societies. Political leaders and nationalist intellectuals made Islam central to their understanding of national distinctiveness in much of the Arab world and Central Asia, but more of them valued the common features of the religious cultures of Indonesia
and to some extent India. Both kinds of constructions of national religious culture influenced proposals to revitalize the nation, accommodate diversity, and shape personal law.

Arguments to build distinctive forms of modernity were voiced early and in especially influential ways in India. Claims that colonial rule was associated with the drain of economic resources from the colonies, the destruction of precolonial life-worlds, and the promotion of religious and ethnic conflict emerged particularly early in India, in the nineteenth century, and were crucial aspects of the anticolonial nationalist visions of the early twentieth century. Gandhi offered a particularly totalizing and popular critique of these features of the colonial encounter. While his preferences to build an agroartisanal economy and devolve most governance functions to the local level were far removed from the determination of modernist nationalists like Nehru to promote industrialization, Gandhian traditionalists and the majority of modernists agreed that India needed to be independent of the global economy and imperial powers. This enabled the modernists to appropriate aspects of Gandhi’s critique of colonialism in favor of their plans to build a developmental state and consolidate parliamentary democracy, as well as to pursue certain goals that Gandhi shared—building national solidarity while recognizing difference, and constructing a secular state that accommodates many features of public religion. Along with various traditionalist allies, the modernists built broad social coalitions that supported versions of this agenda and the dominant Congress Party. The agenda of the modernists included the culturally grounded reform of colonial personal law to promote individual autonomy and reduce gender inequality in certain respects, while maintaining the continuity of the nuclear family, various gendered social roles, and perhaps aspects of lineage authority.

III. STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS, DISCOURSES OF COMMUNITY, AND PERSONAL LAW

Individuals, social groups, associations, social movements, and political parties imagine projects to make society and family, mobilize in their favor, and sometimes reframe them in light of contention with alternative projects on offer in society. They thus influence the projects that states adopt, as well as
the social responses to these projects, which re orient state projects to varying degrees. Most analyses take the interaction of interests, institutional orientations, ideas, and meanings to influence such projects. They vary in how they understand (a) the formation of interests and institutions, (b) the interactions between the formation of interests and institutions, the emergence and circulation of ideas, and the generation of meaning, and (c) how states (or different groups of elites that have significant influence over the state or particular state institutions) formulate projects and propose policies meant to realize those projects.

An older scholarship understood the array of organized interests and institutions in society to shape the goals and actions of states.
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It was unable to account for the varied policies that states adopted in similar social contexts, and for the special influence that states exert when they gain a near monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Scholars that emphasized state autonomy highlighted the definite preferences that public officials have in their specialized policy arenas (in contrast with the indifference of many social actors about various policies), and the resources and influence they often have to shape societal opinion to favor or to at least not obstruct their preferences, and to override powerful interests that remain opposed to their preferred course. While some of these scholars focused on the autonomous formation of the preferences of crucial policy elites,
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others emphasized the ways in which the history of state formation and the resulting structure of the state channeled collective action, and shaped policy makers’ incentives and goals.
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The former versions gave inadequate attention to the factors shaping the preferences of state officials, and both they and the latter disregarded the frequency with which powerful groups influenced these preferences or diverted policy makers from their priorities.
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Other accounts of state centralization and state-led social change overemphasized how far state actions are driven by objectives to maximize control over resources and practices and to maintain stable regimes.
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A variety of policies may be considered compatible with such goals in many contexts, and the groups, ideas, and values with which state elites feel greatest affinity influence their perception of the policies most suitable to these ends and the polices they adopt. Moreover, these explanations do not adequately consider the conditions under which states may be unable to overcome certain forms
of resistance or prefer to accommodate them by devolving aspects of social regulation to authoritative social institutions. Friedman adopted such an analysis of the formation of family law, which shared these problems. He claimed that the state’s greater control over family regulation in Western societies enabled greater social complexity, individual liberty and social equality, and he inadequately recognized the frequent tensions between these ends.
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This approach did not capture why states retain prior personal-law systems or change them in particular ways.

Other scholars took state-society relations to determine the social projects that states undertake and the capacity of states to pursue these projects, without assigning causal primacy to the actions of states or social groups. Their “state-in-society” approach stressed the porousness of state-society boundaries in many contexts, the frequency with which fragments of states ally themselves with different social groups locked in contention with one another, and the ways in which state-society boundaries get constituted through such interactions and alliances. This approach’s emphasis on the influence of conflicts between particular state institutions, groups of state elites, and alliances of different state-society fragments over policy formation was valuable.
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Because personal laws lend the state’s recognition to particular social norms, the formation of these legal systems involves ongoing passage across the boundaries between state and society, and this study draws on various valuable insights of the state-in-society school to understand these processes. It nevertheless differs from some assumptions that much of the work of this school shares: social structure determines interests and the groups that have the capacity to mobilize significant alliances; old elites defend enduring practices that reproduce their dominance and ideas that uphold their authority, often in the name of tradition; emergent elites and groups generate and embrace new ideas that promote alternative practices and forms of solidarity; and the structure of states and the relationships of states or fragments of states with particular social groups determine the projects that states pursue.
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This book’s consideration of the different directions taken by nationalism, multiculturalism, and personal law in postcolonial societies indicates that interests are constructed in different ways in societies with similar patterns of resource organization and distribution; that a variety of practices can often be cred
ibly presented as having the force of tradition in a given society or social group; and that the discourses of community salient in particular societies or among specific social groups influence how individuals construct their interests, the projects of social change launched in society, the alliances formed in favor of these projects, the projects which particular state institutions or segments thereof promote, and how states or state-society fragments modify these projects in view of their interactions with social forces. Analyses focused on state-lineage relations, such as those of Philip Khoury, Joseph Kostiner, and Mounira Charrad, and some of the essays in Julia Adams and Charrad’s
Patrimonial Power in the Modern World
, adopt versions of the state-in-society approach whose explanations of state initiatives to reform society and family have the shortcomings indicated above.
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