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South Asia Research Vol. 37(3): 335–362
Book Reviews 339
long-term growth of agriculture, but will generate immediate and often politically
influential losers. Will they be reconciled to those losses after reading this volume, or
instead take to the streets and ballot boxes to protest? The road to prosperity is more
than just a search for prosperity among sensible policies. It is a much more fraught
process of difficult politics.
References
Bourguignon, F. (2015) The Globalization of Inequality. Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Hausmann, R., Rodrik, D. & Velasco, A. (2005) Growth Diagnostics. Cambridge, MA: Kennedy
School of Government, Harvard University.
Joshi, V. & Little, I. M. D. (1994) India: Macroeconomics and Political Economy, 1964–1991.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Rodrik, D. & Subramananian, A. (2004) From ‘Hindu Growth’ to Productivity Surge:
The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition (NBER Working Paper No. W10376).
Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Sen, K. & Kar, S. (2014) Boom and Bust? A Political Economy Reading of India’s Growth Experience,
1993–2013 (IEG Working Paper No. 342). New Delhi: IEG.
Matthew McCartney
School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Srimati Basu, The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 280 pp.
DOI: 10.1177/0262728017725651
Talking about legal pluralism is currently en vogue, and the Indian context provides an
excellent case study for this phenomenon. Here, ‘a variety of formal and informal, rural
and urban, large and intimate options’ for dispute resolution coexist, ranging from
‘village compounds and clerks’ quarters’ to ‘office rooms and grand court buildings’
(p. 97). From a gendered point of view, this plurality of laws and dispute resolution
forums has been depicted as a boon and a bane. While some scholarship identifies
that rules and decisions based on custom, religion or culture often discriminate against
women (Parashar, 2013), other academics stress that multilocational justice systems
allow ‘forum shopping’, which can facilitate gender equality (Solanki, 2011). Basu
shows how Indian women manoeuvre through the plurilegal system, using state law
as well as ‘do-it-yourself law’ (p. 9) to make their claims regarding marriage law and
domestic violence.
Reasoning from the title that this book is about activists and women’s groups
strategically litigating and campaigning for social change would be wrong. Rather,
Basu provides a description of ‘law at work’ and people’s behaviour in legal settings
340 South Asia Research Vol. 37(3): 335–362
(p. 61). She describes how women engage with the law using ‘feminism-inspired’ forums
(p. 211), family courts and quasi-legal venues such as police-based women’s grievance
cells and NGOs. Through thorough ethnographical studies, Basu provides detailed
insights on how the law shapes and is shaped by the social reality of Indian women.
While not providing an explicit definition of ‘law’, the book indicates that it
is something like a multifunctional tool in the hands of various actors, including
the state, (religious) communities, activists and ordinary people. Law has different
‘incarnations’ (p. 6) and therefore various faces. It is seen as ‘alien’, ‘distant’ or
‘evil’ (p. 10) but also as ‘an introductory gambit’ to bring about societal change
(p. 19), a ‘venue of cultural negotiation’ and identity formation (p. 59). Law must
be ‘accessed’ (p. 94) and ‘framed’ (p. 59). It can be used to empower (p. 93) or to
discipline (p. 150) and can be manipulated (p. 177). The book’s title indicates that
law and violence can be two sides of the same coin, two enemies in a patriarchal
state. Though Basu shows these different facets of the law, notably her work is
not so interested in whether legal norms are good or bad or whether they are used
correctly or misused (p. 4). Rather, she depicts how laws are ‘utilized as new cultural
horizons: to stretch the entitlements of marriage, calibrate the meanings of violence,
or construct kinship’ (p. 4).
Chapter 2, ‘Construction Zones: Marriage Law in Formation’, sets the scene with
a historical overview on policy and legislative debates around four critical colonial and
postcolonial moments: the enactment of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act in
1939, the Hindu Code Bill debates in the 1950s, the 1974 Report of the Committee
on the Status of Women in India, and the 1984 Lok Sabha debates around the Family
Court Bills. These moments all involve ‘transgressions of culture and tradition’ (p. 33).
Against the background of this ‘history of anxieties’ (p. 30), Chapter 3, ‘Beyond
Equivalence: On Reading and Speaking Law’, introduces present-day adjudication
processes in Kolkata’s family courts. Basu first describes her methodology of courtroom
ethnography and the challenges of deciding ‘what to designate (or exclude) as legal
culture’ (p. 62). This focuses on language by examining speech, expression and
translation, challenging the claim that ‘speaking in court equates to agency’ (p. 61).
Rather, Basu stresses that the ‘invitation’ to speak in court is ‘fetishized’ (p. 65),
seen in cases where a litigant’s silence is punished with the threat of an ex-parte
ruling. Translation is another crucial topic in the Indian multilingual context. Basu
observes English, Bangla and Hindi as the most-used languages, so that the work
of courts involves ‘constant translation and paraphrasing, modulated by (perceived)
ethnicity, religion, class, and gender’ (p. 68). Besides language barriers, Basu also
describes incidents of miscommunication on ‘taboo or intimate topics’ (p. 70) like
the consummation of marriage.
Chapter 4, ‘Justice without Lawyers? Living the Family Court Experiment’, describes
‘everyday life’ in the Kolkata Family Court. Family Courts were established by the
Family Courts Act of 1984 as a result of the work of Indian women’s and social work
organisations (p. 96). The objective was that they should be easily accessible and litigants
South Asia Research Vol. 37(3): 335–362
Book Reviews 341
could express their concerns to judges in plain language. In these courts, lawyers only
appear as friends of the court (amici curiae), while counsellors (as paralegals or social
workers) advise on legal issues and help clients negotiate settlements. The Family
Court is therefore often depicted ‘in deliberate contrast to the impersonality of other
courts, suggesting that informality equals greater comfort’ (p. 104). Statistics indicate
that Family Courts are indeed easily approachable by women. Basu observes that far
more women than men file for divorce, maintenance and restitution of conjugal rights.
However, there is also another image of the Family Court: a ‘site of loss, shame, and
failure, of bringing down one’s family’ (p. 91). Basu’s portrait of the Kolkata Family
Court depicts a rather informal atmosphere where a judge compares herself to the ‘elder
sister’ of the male client, advising him ‘of what was best’ for him (p. 104).
It is striking to read that not only counsellors but also judges often see the law as
‘tedious, pointless, and indeed harmful’ (p. 92) and argue for mediation and other
forms of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Attempts to find a compromise rather
than settling the case through a judgement often mean that counsellors and judges
push couples seeking a divorce to get back together. Basu makes out a dominant theme
that the couple’s reunion is seen as the optimal outcome of a dispute, not only for
any child’s well-being but also for the woman who might have ‘greater mobility or
independence [...] within the patched-up marriage’ than she would have after divorce
(p. 103). Counsellors ‘triumphantly’ told Basu about reunions they had brought about
(p. 102), involving ‘conversion tales of axe-wielding husbands, with happy endings
whose veracity is impossible to ascertain’ (p. 103).
Chapter 5, ‘In Sanity and in Wealth: Diagnosing Conjugality and Kinship’,
portrays contemporary marriage in Kolkata, based on complaints brought to courts
and counsellors. It deals with the ‘widespread lament’ about divorce becoming more
popular due to the rise of individuality in ‘modern marriages’ and loss of the
extended family (p. 118). In this, the media plays a central role, suggesting that
the law (on maintenance, for instance) favours women too much (p. 142). Basu
highlights that ‘modern’ marriage and the ‘traditional’ family need not necessarily be in
opposition and that new forms of kinship are created in court, even as the breakdown
of the kinship system is diagnosed.
Chapter 6, ‘Sexual Property: Rape and Marriage Conjoined’, focuses on rape
charge scenarios that ‘illustrate rape to be considered primarily a crime against kinship
rather than a violation of bodily integrity’ (p. 31). Basu portrays three categories:
first, cases brought against men who refuse to turn sex into marriage, despite earlier
promises; second, cases where the rapist offers to marry the survivor to remedy the
violence; and third, rape charges filed against eloping partners to control exogamous
marriage choices. Basu reveals biases of the courts, where ‘married and virgin [...]
women are extended full-blown state support while women free of marriage are
ripe for suspicion’ (p. 156) and shows how deeply the discourse on rape is linked
to issues of chastity, social legitimacy, kinship hierarchies, female agency and the
‘misuse’ of laws.
342 South Asia Research Vol. 37(3): 335–362
Chapter 7, ‘Strategizing Spaces: Negotiating the Violence out of Domestic Violence
Claims’, focuses on criminal prosecutions of domestic violence under Section 498A
of the Indian Penal Code alongside civil remedies and mediation. A highly debated
provision, to some it is a powerful measure to help women negotiate physical
violence and economic well-being. To others, especially men’s groups, it is ‘a way to
torture husbands by manipulating law’ (p. 177). Basu shows that in this context, the
coexistence of multiple (quasi-) legal options is not necessarily an advantage. Having
different possibilities for pursuing grievances—police, courts, arbitration boards,
NGOs and women’s groups—also means that people must navigate between difficult
choices and sometimes contradictory directives (p. 183). Women’s organisations (Basu
describes the work of two organisations in detail) are only too ‘aware of the limitations
of intervention and the necessity of compromise’ (p. 201). Regarding domestic violence
cases, sometimes the best they can do is to provide practical advice and emotional
support (p. 201).
Basu’s conclusion, ‘The Trouble Is Marriage: Conclusion and Worries’, on
the ‘legacies of feminism-inspired institutions’ (p. 211) is realistic and somewhat
disillusioned. On the one hand, marriage is ‘one of the most obvious sites where law
has transformed cultural practices’ (p. 212). On the other hand, there is still a ‘cultural
understanding that marriage protects women [...] economically, sexually, and socially’
(p. 216). Economic concerns in particular are often obstacles, for instance when women
are sent back into violent relationships to secure their economic interests (p. 214).
The hybrid possibilities of legal pluralism do not necessarily provide gender justice,
but rather ‘come at the cost of turning a blind eye to violence’ (p. 214). Only when
‘ascriptions of masculinity and femininity, emotion and comportment, sex and money’
are challenged and rethought (p. 217) is gender justice within marriage imaginable.
Basu’s interdisciplinary work is empirically rich and the author is an excellent
observer. She has a talent for describing the scenes she witnessed in ways that give the
reader almost the sense of being with her in court, where one ‘hears the clatter of manual
typewriters’ (pp. 87–8) and sees litigants carrying ‘folders where bright red-and-gold
wedding cards (which serve as standard evidence) stand out against a fat pile of court
papers’ (p. 89). In much detail, she describes cases as well as conversations with judges,
litigants and other people. She quotes announcements and notes found on blackboards
in the court corridors. She embeds her arguments in cultural contexts by referring
to songs, poems and films. Her descriptions are supplemented with photographs of
scenes inside and outside the court. Quotes are often given in the original language,
Bangla or Hindi, and Basu complements her translations with explanations of the
terms and phrases used and of the context. The book focuses on description rather
than providing readers with much analysis. Though positioning herself as a ‘feminist
scholar’ (p. 63), Basu often refrains from making judgments. But the picture she
draws provides fascinating insights, making this work a valuable contribution to the
scholarship on law and gender in India and on legal pluralism.
South Asia Research Vol. 37(3): 335–362
Book Reviews 343
References
Parashar, A. (2013) ‘Religious Personal Laws as Non-state Laws: Implications for Gender Justice’,
The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 45(1): 5–23.
Solanki, G. (2011) Adjudication in Religious Family Laws: Cultural Accommodation, Legal
Pluralism, and Gender Equality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tanja Herklotz
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), xxxvi + 324 pp.
DOI: 10.1177/0262728017725652
This study of the Muslim Bengali public sphere in the first half of the twentieth century
brings an exciting fresh perspective on questions of language and identity. Bose enriches
the existing body of research on language and its relationship to national and ethnic
identity, a wide field that ranges from analysing the politics of linguistic nationalism
to understanding the numerous language riots that erupted in the postcolonial states
of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. What makes this contribution critically important
for this particular body of research is the framework of Muslim public spheres Bose
employs to situate dynamic intellectual conversations. He carefully traces the literary
and political debates centred on the place of Bengali as a language for the Muslim
community in East Bengal. Caught between arguments made by North Indian Muslims
of the Muslim League (ML) on the cosmopolitanism of Urdu and its role as a marker
for Indian Muslimness, and the highly sanskritised Bengali gentlefolk (bhadralok) of
Calcutta, the Muslim intelligentsia of Bengal aspired to carve out their own unique
history and culture.
The six chapters of this book examine the rich literature of the Muslim Bengali
public sphere and provide insight into the vibrancy of vernacular publics at the
turn of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 on ‘Modern Bengali Muslim Literary
Culture’ examines the associational life of Muslim Bengali intellectuals in the post-
1905 partition period. Their writing was primarily focused on the theme of social
upliftment rather than an abstract transregional Muslim identity. This began in full
force from the establishment of the Anjuman-i-Ulama-Bangla in 1912 (p. 21). Bose
argues that Bengali Muslim identity in this period essentially turned inward, away
from the transregional universal Islam that Eric Beverley has recently called ‘Muslim
Internationalism’ that became dominant in Princely Hyderabad, for example. Another
association, the Bangali Mussalman Sahitya Samiti (BMSS) established in 1911,
brought students and activists together to bring out a literary magazine focused on
Bengali Muslim history and heritage to reclaim the language as expressive of a Muslim
