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S. Rahman, Review of R. Kapoor and B. Cossman, Subversive Sites. Feminist Engagements with Law in India, New Delhi: Sage (Feminist Legal Studies V1/1 (1998), 140-141)

This book has been written by two extremely distinguished women's rights activists - Ratna Kapoor, a lawyer and co-director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi and Brenda Cossman, Associate Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada and Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies. The Book itself is a necessary document for the understanding of the relationship between women and the law in India today.

The book emphasizes the status of Hindu women in India under the pressures of an increasingly stifling Hindu Right and how the law has been historically supporting patriarchal norms and relationships which have shaped the Indian family into what it is today. It explores "the extent to which assumptions about women's identities as wives and mothers limit the promise of legal equality" and "alternative strategies for using law as a subversive site in feminist struggles that can better capture the complex role of law in social change". The book also discusses constitutional provisions, as contained in the Indian constitution, in the light of existing Hindu Family laws, equality and gender discrimination.

Kapoor and Cossman also discuss the debates on such subjects as equality, political agendas, and affirmative action in relation to the socio-legal status of women in India and how women can use the law to challenge the present patriarchal, traditional norms and alter their status in society for the better. Their object is to attempt to focus on the relationship between familial ideology and equality rights and to highlight the complex and ambiguous ways in which the law strengthens the idea of women's inferiority and insubordination - their main argument being that the family is one of the major sites of a woman's oppression. Included in the list of inter-family oppression are division of labour, discriminatory family laws and cultural norms and familial ideology. Their discussion is based around two different sets of ideologies: "moral regulation through which women are constituted as, and judged in accordance with the standards of loyal wives and self - sacrificing wives; and economic regulations through which women are constituted as economically dependent" (p.15).

The book boldly berates the activities of the communal and conservative sections of society and the Hindu Right - the contemporary political movement in India, which includes the central organizations and movements of Hindus communalism, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtra Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) - and their involvement in attempting to use the law to "promote its normative vision of the world" and complicating the role that law can play in the emancipation of women by changing the legal terrain. Kapoor and Cossman explore the ways in which the fanatic Hindu Right has appropriated legal issues concerning women - such as violence against women, the reform of discriminatory personal laws - and how the human concepts of equality and secularism have been taken up and re-defined by them to further their extremist views. According to the authors, "Equality and secularism - concepts central to India's democratic tradition - have become powerful weapons in the Hindu Right's attack on minority rights" (p.233).

In all, the extremely enlightening and engaging discourse contained in "Subversive Sites" is a necessary movement towards understanding the position of women and the law in India today and what can be done by women in order to challenge the legal system and those who are so intent on corrupting the legal machinery in order to further suppress the women of India. The book not only exposes the limits of the law, but also explores the possibilities for creating social change in the status of women.

Salra Rahman

University of Kent at Canterbury

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