Book Dialogue | Qudsiya Contractor reflects on Sagnik Dutta's 'In the Shadow of Minority Rights'

The relationship of the state and family laws has always been a vexed one in India with recent developments bearing witness to the fact that the separation between state and family, individual and community are riddled with paradoxes. Earlier this year, the northern state of Uttarakhand implemented a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) brought into force by the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP, a Hindu-right political party), the first of its kind in India. The revision of family laws has long been priority for Hindu nationalists in their agenda to maintain stringent community boundaries and sexual regulation through law. It has come into force two years after a committee with no representation from the nation’s diverse religious groups was formed to suggest its drafting. The new trend in legal reform seems to be pushing forward an ideology of paternalism rather than bring about a culture of gender equality. Notwithstanding the long and laborious history of the debate on whether India should have a UCC or not, many have seen the formulation of one as an opportunity to reform family laws to be gender just. Others have raised concerns over whether it is really gendering equality that is on the agenda of Hindu nationalists or is it anxieties over religio-cultural homogeneity that drive such a legal shakedown. This has opened up a long standing debate on the relationship between state and religious laws governing families in multireligious, multicultural societies. The secularization of family law through the implementation of UCC in this case hardly seems to be about state neutrality towards religion. Rather, it rearticulates religion along lines modeled on a liberal understanding of the relationship between religion and the state. Secularism in this understanding does not simply institute a firewall separation between religion and state but entwines them intimately, an intertwining that is shot through with contradictions and paradoxes (Mahmood, 2012).

The new trend in legal reform seems to be pushing forward an ideology of paternalism rather than bring about a culture of gender equality.

Sagnik Dutta’s book ‘In the Shadow of minority rights’ is an interesting and timely intervention into debates surrounding minority rights, gender and the post-colonial Indian state that have animated the Muslim question in the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism in mainstream politics. It brings in a fresh way to look at minority rights, gender and family law that might help us revisit reified categories and decolonise epistemologies. Dutta urges us to look to the complex history of minority rights in India to find ways to enrich existing theorisations of the political. Minority rights linked to religion-based personal laws, they suggest are nested within colonial epistemologies of religion and the law and the long process of minoritisation of Muslims by both the colonial and the postcolonial states in India. The book challenges this approach by exploring what ethical commitments and spatial practices minority communities bring to bear upon their engagement with rights. What is of interest to me is how Dutta approaches political theory through ethnography bringing our attention to how minority rights are constituted in the everyday life of Muslim communities in India ‘through a range of discursive, ethical, embodied and spatial ways’ (p. 7-8). For Dutta, these engagements with the legal domain of minority rights can neither be reduced to abstract, normative goods nor to the sovereign power of the secular state. Instead, they focus on the entanglement of ethics, ethical self-fashioning and everyday gendered spatial negotiations with rights in moments when Muslim women engage the legal framework of minority rights in India. Dutta shows us how an ethnographic approach ‘can and does unsettle a fixation with religion and the law, understood in strictly codified, textual forms’. 

Dutta urges us to look to the complex history of minority rights in India to find ways to enrich existing theorisations of the political. 

The books takes us into the everyday workings of the Indian Muslim women’s movement or BMMA founded in 2007, that has been involved in resolving problems of marriage and divorce through alternative dispute resolution forums involving both state and non-state actors. Most of the action that Dutta describes in the book takes place in the workshops on the Quran and Constitution and the sharia adalat (courts) organised by BMMA in Mumbai. In order to unpack and understand minority rights, Dutta describes how the state is simultaneously instantiated, mobilised and constituted through everyday interactions, spaces and materials with non-state actors in alternative dispute resolution forums and activist networks. We are taken through the diverse, non-textual ways in which the practice and meaning of minority rights are constituted. They focus on the entanglement of ethics, ethical self-fashioning and everyday gendered spatial negotiations with rights in moments when Muslim women engage the legal framework of minority rights in India. Drawing on ethnography, Dutta turns our attention to a reified category of the minority and legal, juridical concepts of minority rights, questioning the colonial conceptions of religion that liberal theory reproduces. For instance, in chapter two ‘Becoming equals’, they take a closer look at how gender equality is constituted as an everyday ethical commitment by invoking Quranic ideals of compassion through the work of a female qazi and the women’s shariaadalat. Dutta finds that compassion is premised on the spiritual equality of both men and women, where both were obligated to observe particular forms of ethical conduct towards each other suggesting that it was not just an abstract legal category but also had a practical and embodied dimension. This notion of spiritual equality was also the basis in critiquing interpretations of religious norms and socio-cultural norms that led to gender discrimination. In the adjudication of disputes in the sharia adalat, notions of ethical conduct were interlaced with concerted local struggles against gender discrimination in state and non-state forums such as the police station and the family. Pitting individual versus community rights just does not work here, as Dutta shows us that debates of gender equality in liberal multiculturalism often can limit our understanding of how gender and minority rights are interwoven while state regulation of both do not necessarily help mediate the struggle for gender equality.  

In my own work, I have found that the context of unemployment, abject poverty and crime inspires new religious imaginations or creative ways of addressing concerns of living a Muslim life that adhere to set notions about what might be regarded as authentically religious practice. Everyday practices, interactions and efforts often produce new forms of interpretation and religious authority that question established notions of religiosity. These everyday negotiations and contestations create the context for ethical self-fashioning and challenge traditional hierarchies while also producing new ones. Such new forms of organic leadership that I call ‘new religious intellectuals’ are fashioned and forged through discursive yet embodied ways in the context of socio-spatial segregation test religious categories derived from a single isolated set of scriptural codes (Contractor, 2020). Dutta’s book draws out similar workings showing us how non-textual processes of unmaking, making and circulating religious ideas in the context of Muslim family law are important sites to understand how political processes of change unfold within a complex web of social hierarchies. I see parallels in how these approaches can contribute to addressing the orientalist baggage that shrouds the study of religion.   

I could not help but notice that the life stories of Dutta’s interlocutors shed light on how the context of ghettoization and communal violence has shaped their lives at several points in the book. In analysing how the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu nationalists and the communal violence in its aftermath in 1992-93 is remembered in a predominantly Muslim slum neighbourhood in Mumbai, I have suggested that it is the neighbourhood that is both the site of violence as well as the location from which an alternative politics is articulated through collective memory. It is here that the Muslim poor debate and talk back to the politics of national belonging while negotiating their relationship to state power and cultural authority within the context of the everyday communal politics that defines Mumbai’s socio-spatial landscape (Contractor, Q. 2022). Muslim women’s negotiations with minority rights Dutta suggests are constituted by a negotiation with the politics of ghettoization. In the chapter titled, ‘Remaking the ghetto’, Dutta shows us the spatial dimensions of the practice of minority rights by tracing how the politics of ghettoization and state violence against minorities produces and shapes the domain of alternative dispute resolution and minority rights. Muslim women ‘reconfigured their relationship with the home, police station and neighbourhood as sites of resistance against patriarchy of both state and non-state actors’ (p. 92). In exploring the spatial dimensions of the practice of minority rights further, in the chapter titled, ‘Estranged attachments’, Dutta looks at how the politics of ghettoization and state violence against minorities produced and shaped the domain of alternative dispute resolution and minority rights. Seen through a feminist geopolitical lens, Dutta persuades us to look at the relationship between state, minority rights and gender as a form of ‘estranged familiarity’ (p. 115), both inhabited and contested by women in alternative dispute resolution forums and in activist networks. The state is instantiated not only discursively in cases, laws and intersecting legal regimes; its shadow is ever present in everyday interactions within and outside the courts and in the material forms that circulate in these spaces. 

Recently, I have been exploring how social solidarities are forged and the role socio-spatial contexts play in engaging with both the civic and ethical tenets it draws from.  I have suggested that the processes of building solidarity are not exclusively religious but rather form the bedrock of civic participation where civility is considered and performed as a public virtue essential not just to democratic integration but also social criticism. Hence, religion is one of the many influences in the lives of the Muslim poor and their engagement with religion is shaped by their personal circumstances as much as they are shaped by political, economic and social conditions they find themselves in (Contractor, 2025). Social solidarities are forged through a reinterpretation of traditions that reinforce an egalitarian ethos in the context of the increasing socio-economic marginalisation of large sections of the urban Muslims. Universal civil elements in the practices of Islam are re-interpreted in newer ways to address the present, while  social solidarity is built on a shared commitment to an idealised future that is not just defined in Islamic terms (as the afterlife) but is also reflective of the aspirations of the Muslim poor in a civic sense. I find a certain resonance in Dutta’s work in how ethnographic approaches can move beyond a textual, essentialised and reified conception of the law and religious community. Dutta’s greater objective through the book is to decolonise the discourse on minority rights, gender and liberalism. They write in an approachable manner yet make complex theoretical arguments and interventions challenging standard ways of theorising minority rights in liberal political theory. The book is a promising attempt at showing us how ‘transnational feminist praxis and deterritorialised registers of belonging shape the everyday politics of negotiations with minority rights unmooring universal categories such as rights and gender equality from the ‘moral grandstanding’ of Western, liberal feminism and its stereotypes concerning ‘oppressed women’ (p. 12). With the recent developments in family law under the influence of Hindu nationalism, such an exercise in excavating liberal legalism would certainly push us to think of newer ways to unfix the discourse of minority rights from the hegemonic framework of liberal nationalism.

Qudsiya Contractor is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Education, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. 

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