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Book Review: Understanding Women’s Land Rights: Gender Discrimination in Ownership edited by Prem Chowdhry.

The promised land for Eve, at last

The three areas that are crucial and need to be strengthened for the empowerment of women are land/property ownership followed by education and employment.

The promised land for Eve, at last

On solid ground: The book contains 14 essays which critically evaluate the existing state laws, statutes and customary laws with regard to women's land rights



Reicha Tanwar

The three areas that are crucial and need to be strengthened for the empowerment of women are land/property ownership followed by education and employment. This has been corroborated by women of varying ages, social class, caste and professions as revealed in the field work in various regions of Haryana by Prem Choudhary, who has edited the volume, Understanding Women’s Land Rights : Gender Discrimination in Ownership. 

Having a right to land or other productive assets gives women a sort of bargaining power that they would normally not have and in turn they gain the ability to assert themselves in various aspects of their lives, both within and outside their home. Possessing means of production entails possessing not only a source of income but also a source of authority/power and mobility leading to having access to other facilities like education and health.

This exhaustive volume is the second in the series edited by Prem Choudhary and volume 13 in the Series of Land Reforms in India. It attempts to understand land rights of women covering 14 out of the total of 29 states of India. The states included for study are Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkand, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Nagaland, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand. The rest of the states have been covered in the first volume. 

This volume contains 14 essays which critically evaluate the existing state laws, statutes and customary laws with regard to women’s land rights. It is a pioneering work as it combines both fieldwork, and the existing literature on the land rights of women. 

Although a progressive Act at the time of its enactment (1956), the Hindu Succession Act 1956 introduced for the first time the notion of a woman as a daughter, sister, widow and mother as an equal and absolute owner of property with full right to its disposal. But this Act had several limitations which was the non-inclusion of women as coparceners in the joint Hindu family property. They enjoyed only maintenance rights as wives, widows or unmarried daughters. The male becomes coparcener at birth. It was only in 2005 that the Hindu Succession Act was amended by which women were granted equal rights as men in all property including agricultural land, owned or tenanted, ancestral or self acquired. It made daughters, married or unmarried, equal to sons in joint Hindu family property with the right to claim partition. 

Having birth right in joint family property also means that it cannot be willed away by male members. The amendment underlines that daughters and sons, both are equal and important members of the parental family. But not all of India is governed by this law. Most of the northeastern states lie outside its scope. Parts of Assam, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur remain governed by the customary laws which some essays in the volume have very well brought out are gender discriminatory.

The essays in this volume argue that most of the customs followed in these areas are highly skewed in the favour of men except for certain tribal traditions. But even these traditions are fast deteriorating under the impact of extensive commercialisation, industrialisation, coming in of individual ownership, deforestation and wide scale displacement. These changes are leading towards strengthening of patriarchy and at times to patriliny even in matriarchal societies.

The three major contentions that the book underlines in order to arrest the gender discrimination in land rights are legal enactments their implementation and social acceptance. The last contention is, of course, of great importance because despite all the good intentions of the lawmakers, many women-friendly laws continue to be violated or not enforced. There is a vast difference between legal recognition of a claim and its social acceptance and enforcement. 

Certain provisions of the law, however, prove to very effective such as the scheme of giving concession in the stamp duty to women property buyers introduced in 2004 in many states of India. Official records show that in all these states there has been a sharp increase in the number of property registrations by women whether these are plots, agricultural land or commercial property.

Prem Choudhary is known for her meticulous research in gender studies. This work bears a stamp of her outstanding scholarship. The Centre for Rural Studies of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussorie, has done well in bringing out this very useful volume.

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