A post-colonial patriarchy? Representing family in the Indian nation-state

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELEANOR NEWBIGIN

AbstractThat the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men's property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Parkinson

The Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) provides that judges must not alter property rights on the breakdown of the relationship unless satisfied that it is just and equitable to do so. This is the principle of judicial restraint. In the past, and prior to the 2012 decision of the High Court in Stanford v Stanford, this principle was given almost no effect. The High Court sought to correct this approach, insisting that the family courts should not begin from an assumption that a couple’s property rights are or should be different from the state of the legal and equitable title. It also reaffirmed that there is no community of property in Australia. This article considers the significance of the principle of judicial restraint: first, in cases where the property is already jointly owned and, secondly, in cases where the couple have chosen to keep their finances separate.


2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Pinelli

Purpose: To determine the relationship between family coping and resources and family adjustment and parental stress in the acute phase of the NICU experience.Design: Correlational study based on the Resiliency Model of Family Stress, Adjustment, and Adaptation. Main study instruments included the State Anxiety scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Family Inventory of Resources for Management, the Family Crisis Oriented Personal Evaluation Scales, and the General Functioning subscale of the McMaster Family Assessment Device.Sample: Data collected from 124 mother and father pairs within two to four days of their infant’s admission to the NICU.Main Outcome Variables: Family adjustment and parental stress.Results: Adequate resources were more strongly related to positive adjustment and decreased stress than were either coping or being a first-time parent. The relationships among the variables were generally the same for both parents. Mothers utilized more coping strategies than did fathers.Practice Recommendations: Families with limited resources should be identified early to facilitate their adjustment to the NICU.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1296-1306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria A. Petrini ◽  
Jansle V. Rocha

In Brazil, the State of Goiás is one of sugarcane expansion's frontiers to meet the growing demand for biofuels. The objective of this study was to identify the municipalities where there were replacement of annual crops (mainly grains) by sugarcane in the state of Goiás, as well as indicate correlations between the sugarcane expansion and the family farming production, in the period between 2005 and 2010. For this purpose, grains crop mask and sugarcane crop mask, obtained from satellite images, were intersected using geoprocessing techniques. It was also used IBGE data of sugarcane production and planted area, and data of family farming production linked with the National Food Acquisition Program (PAA), in relation to the number of cooperatives and family farmers. The crops masks and data tables of the National Food Acquisition Program were provided by National Food Supply Agency. There were 95 municipalities that had crops replacement, totaling 281,554 hectares of grains converted to sugarcane. We highlight the municipalities of Santa Isabel, Iaciara, Maurilândia, and Itapaci, where this change represented more than half of their agricultural areas. In relation to family farming, the sugarcane expansion in the state of Goiás has not affected their activities during the period studied.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELEANOR NEWBIGIN

AbstractStudies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under the control of self-interested sections of the Indian elite. In terms of citizenship, the failure of the state to do more to realize the egalitarian promise of the Fundamental Rights, set out in the Constitution of 1950, has often been attributed to interference by these powerful elite. Tracing the interplay between debates about Hindu property rights and popular support or tolerance for the notion of individual, liberal citizenship, this paper argues that the principles espoused in the Fundamental Rights were never neutral abstractions but, long before independence, were firmly embedded in the material world of late-colonial political relations. Thus, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject of the Indian Constitution was not the individual, freed from ascriptive categories of gender or religious identity, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Kieu Nga Nguyen ◽  
Helen Jaqueline McLaren

Vietnamese Confucian religio-philosophical ideals regulate social order in the family, community, and nation state. As a result, women’s duties to their husbands, fathers, ancestors, and Vietnam powerfully permeate all aspects of gendered life. This study of 20 Vietnamese women explored their experiences as international students in Australia. Primary focus was on how their gendered Confucian histories compelled their migratory journeys, influenced changes to their intimate partner experiences while in Australia, and the reimagining of identity, hopes and dreams on looking forward at their future returns to gendered life in Vietnam. The application of Janus Head phenomenology enabled understanding of how the women’s temporality became influenced by fascinations of future change, mixed with feelings of uncertainty and limbo that arose when forward facing hopes were thwarted by their looking back realities. There was an intense sense of unresolve as time drew closer to the end of their studies, in which the women associated feelings related to returning to Vietnam’s strict Confucian informed gender order as a “living Hell.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-166
Author(s):  
Eric Nsuh Zuhmboshi

Abstract The relationship that exists between the state and her citizens has been described by Jean Jacques Rousseau as “a social contract.” In this contractual agreement, citizens are bound to respect state authority while the state, in turn, has the bounden duty to protect her citizens and guide them in their aspirations. In fact, any state that does not perform this duty is guilty of violating the fundamental rights of her citizens. This, however, is not the case in most postcolonial societies where the citizens see the state as an aggressive apparatus against their wellbeing because the state is not fulfilling its own part of the social contract, which requires them to protect the citizens and guide them in their aspirations. This unfortunate situation has laid the foundation for protest and anti-establishment writings in post-colonial societies – especially in Africa. Since literature, as a semiotic resource, is coterminous with its socio-political context, this attitude of the state has drawn inimical criticism from key postcolonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, and Nadine Gordimer. Using Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo, this essay shows the relationship between state-terrorism and the traumatic conditions of the citizens in contemporary Africa. From the perspective of trauma theory, the essay defends the premise that the postcolonial subjects/characters, in the novels under study, are traumatized and depressed because of their continuous victimization by the state. Due to this state-imposed terror and hardship, the citizens are forced to indulge in political agitation, radicalism and violence in response to their destitute and impoverished conditions.


Legal Studies ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Wong

Ownership of the family home is usually not disputed until either the relationship between the spouses or cohabitants breakdown or there is a competing claim over the property by a third party. In such circumstances, determination of ownership rights becomes imperative. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 gives the courts adjustive powers to deal with disputes between spouses on the breakdown of the marriage. Notwithstanding this, there may be circumstances where it will be necessary or desirable to determine property rights between spouses. Furthermore, the adjustive powers of the courts are not applicable to cohabitants. Thus, in the absence of legal co-ownership in the family home, cohabitants and spouses who cannot rely on the 1973 Act will have to establish an equitable interest in the property. The analyses relied on are primarily based on property law and trusts principles and, more particularly, imputed trusts and proprietary estoppel. Under trusts principles, imputed trusts are usually taken to refer to resulting and constructive trusts.


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-334
Author(s):  
Silas W. Allard

In her essay “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had reached the state where whoever was thrown out of one of these tightly organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family of nations altogether.” Surveying the aftermath of the world wars, the same aftermath that eventually led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt found that a person had to be emplaced—the subject of a political space—in the state-oriented order of geopolitics to be cognizable as a subject of human rights. The stateless, being displaced, were excluded from such a regime of rights and from the global political community. Bare humanity, Arendt argued, was an insufficiently binding political identity. As she wrote in her arresting language, “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Dalla Torre

Dopo essersi rilevato il fenomeno della rinascita del fatto religioso nell’odierna società secolarizzata, grazie anche al massiccio fenomeno immigratorio, si descrive l’impatto del pluralismo etnico-religioso sulle tradizionali realtà degli ordinamenti giuridici statali; impatto reso ancora più problematico per l’ascesa di nuovi poteri, in particolare quello tecnico-scientifico, insofferenti ad una eteroregolamentazione non solo sul piano etico, ma anche sul piano giuridico. Si mette quindi in evidenza una crescente ambiguità che investe la biogiuridica: da un lato la nuova esigenza di riconoscere il rivendicato “diritto alla diversità” da parte delle diverse formazioni etnico-religiose; dall’altro l’esigenza di una regolamentazione giuridica uniforme a garanzia dell’ordinata convivenza attorno ad una scala valoriale che abbia nella “vita” il bene centrale ed ultimo da salvaguardare. Tra le conclusioni cui si giunge è innanzitutto quella per cui la pacifica convivenza in una società multietnica e multireligiosa può essere assicurata, nel rispetto delle diverse tradizioni e culture, attraverso il ricorso a moderati e saggi riconoscimenti di spazio al diritto personale all’interno degli ordinamenti statali, ma nei limiti rigorosi posti dalle esigenze di tutela della dignità umana. Ciò tocca anche la questione dei “nuovi poteri” che, nel contesto di una società globalizzata, impongono una rielaborazione dell’idea di diritto che, partendo dal quadro di un sistema di fonti che tende sempre più ad essere organizzato non secondo gerarchia ma secondo competenza, si ispiri al principio del riconoscimento dell’essere umano nella sua dignità, indipendentemente dall’appartenenza etnico-religiosa. Infine si mette in evidenza l’inaccettabilità di un “diritto debole”, solo procedimentale, perché sostanziale negazione della funzione stessa del diritto, che è quella di prevenire e/o dirimere i conflitti tra interessi in gioco e, quindi, i contrasti tra le parti della società, difendendo nel rapporto i soggetti più deboli; così come si mette in evidenza che il prezioso bene della laicità dello Stato non è – come invece spesso si ritiene – salvaguardato da un “diritto debole”, ma solo da un diritto giusto. ---------- After being noticed the phenomenon of the rebirth of the religious fact in today’s secularized society, it is described also the impact of the ethnic-religious pluralism on the traditional realities of the government juridical arrangements; impact made even more problematic for the ascent of new powers, particularly that technical-scientific, impatient to an heteroregulation not only on the ethical plan, but also on the juridical plan. It is put therefore in evidence an increasing ambiguity that invests the biojuridical: from one side the new demand to recognize the vindicated “law to difference” from different ethnic-religious formations; from the other the demand of a uniform juridical regulation to guarantee of the orderly cohabitation around to a scale of value that has in “life” central and ultimate good to safeguard. Between the conclusions which the author comes it is, first of all, that for which the peaceful cohabitation in a multiethnic and multireligious society can be assured, in the respect of the different traditions and cultures, through the recourse to moderate and wise recognition of space to the personal law into the government arrangements, but in the rigorous limits set by the demands of guardianship of human dignity. This also touches the matter of new powers that, in the contest of globalization, impose a new elaboration of the idea of law that, departing from the picture of a system of sources that extends more and more to not be organized according to hierarchy but according to competence, inspire to the principle of the recognition of the human being in its dignity, independently from the ethnic-religious affiliation. Finally it is put in evidence the unacceptability of a “weak law”, just procedural, as substantial negation of the law function itself, which is that to prevent and/or to settle the conflicts between affairs at stake and, therefore, contrasts between the parts of the society, defending in the relationship the weakest subjects; as it is evidenced that the precious good of laity of the State is not - like instead it is often considered - safeguarded by a weak law, but only by a correct law.


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