The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Next Wave: New Directions in Womens Studies)

A major postcolonial feminist theorist explores the gendered nature of citizenship and the state. The Scandal of the State is a revealing study of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women’s actual needs and lives. Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women’s identities and how, reciprocally, women and “women’s issues” affect the state’s role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the postcolonial state in implicit contrast with the “enlightened,” postfeminist neoliberal state in the West. Her analysis wrestles with complex social realities, taking into account the influence of age, ethnicity, religion, and class on individual and group identities as well as the shifting, heterogeneous nature of the state itself. The Scandal of the State develops through a series of compelling case studies, each of which centers around an incident exposing the contradictory position of the Indian state vis-à-vis its female citizens and, ultimately, the inadequacy of its commitment to women’s rights. Sunder Rajan focuses on the custody battle over a Muslim child bride, the compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded women in state institutional care, female infanticide in Tamilnadu, prostitution as labor rather than crime, and the surrender of the female outlaw Phoolan Devi. She also looks at the ways the Uniform Civil Code presented many women with a stark choice between allegiance to their religion and community or the secular assertion of individual rights. Rich with theoretical acumen and activist passion, The Scandal of the State is a powerful critique of the mutual dependence of women and the state on one another in the specific context of a postcolonial modernity. Cover 1 Preface 6 Contents 9 Preface 11 Acknowledgments 15 1 Introduction: Women, Citizenship, Law, and the Indian State 19 I Women in Custody 57 2 The Ameena ‘‘Case’’: The Female Citizen and Subject 59 3 Beyond the Hysterectomies Scandal: Women, the Institution, Family, and State 90 II Women in Law 133 4 The Prostitution Question(s): Female Agency, Sexuality, and Work 135 5 Women Between Community and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates 165 III Killing Women 193 6 Children of the State? Unwanted Girls in Rural Tamilnadu 195 7 Outlaw Woman: The Politics of Phoolan Devi’s Surrender, 1983 230 Notes 255 References 297 Index 319 The,Scandal,of,the,State Looking at the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation state & Indian women's actual needs & lives, this study reveals that the identities of each are closely intertwined. The author discusses a series of case studies which reveal the complex social realities at play Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [279]-299) And Index.