Multi-religious and multi-ethnic democracies face the challenge of constructing accommodative arrangements that can both facilitate cultural diversity and ensure women's rights within religio-cultural groups. This thesis is an investigation of the Indian state's policy of legal pluralism in recognition of religious family laws in India. The Indian state has adopted a model of what I have termed "shared adjudication" in which the state shares its adjudicative authority with internally heterogeneous religious groups and civil society in the regulation of marriage among Hindus and Muslims. / Combining theoretical frameworks of state-society relations, feminist theory, and legal pluralism, and drawing from ethnographic research conducted in state courts, caste and sect councils, and "doorstep law courts," I pay analytical attention to state-society interactions at the interface of religious family laws. State and non-state sources of legal authority construct internally contested and heterogeneous notions of the conjugal family, gender relations, and religious membership, and they transmit them across legal spheres. These dynamic processes of communication reconstitute the interiors of religious, state, and civic legal orders, and they fracture the homogenised religious identities grounded in hierarchical gender relations within the conjugal family. / Within the interstices of state and society---which are used imaginatively by state and societal actors---the Indian model points towards an open-ended and process-oriented conception of state-society relations that encompasses not only the binary of conflict and cooperation, but also communication between state and society. The "shared adjudication" model facilitates diversity as it allows the construction of hybrid religious identities, creates fissures in ossified group boundaries, and provides institutional spaces for ongoing inter-societal dialogue between religious groups, civil society, and the state. This pluralized legal sphere, governed by ideologically diverse legal actors, can thus increase women's rights in law, and despite its limitations, the transformative potential of women's collective agency effects institutional change.

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In this thesis, I focus on the relationship between gender and nation in post-colonial India, through the lens of Muslim women, who are located on the margins of both religious community and nation. The contradictory embrace of a composite national identity with an ascriptive religious identity, has had critical consequences for Muslim women, to whom the state has simultaneously granted and denied equal citizenship. The impact is felt primarily in the continuing disadvantage of women through the denial of gender equality within the family. The state's regulation of gender roles and family relationships in the 'private sphere', inevitably has determined women's status as citizens in the public sphere. / In this context, the notion of citizenship becomes a focus of any exploration of the legal status of Muslim women. I explore the idea of citizenship as a space of subaltern secularism that opens up the possibility for Indian women of all faiths, to reclaim a selfhood, free from essentialist definitions of gender interests and prescripted identities. I evaluate the realm of constitutional law as a counter-hegemonic discourse that can challenge existing power structures. Finally, I argue for the need to acknowledge the hybridity of culture and the modernity of tradition, to emphasise the integration of the colonial past with the postcolonial present. Such an understanding is critical to the feminist emancipatory project as it reveals the manner in which oppositional categories of public/private, true Muslim woman/feminist, Muslim/Other, Western/Indian, and modern/traditional, have been used to deny women equal rights.

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