Book review: Tanika Sarkar, Religion & Women in India: Gender, Faith and Politics 1770s–1980s

This book is an extraordinary treatise on women and politics in modern India (with a very short concluding chapter on Pakistan and Bangladesh).There are nine chapters, covering a range of themes that mark the trajectory of women and gender relations across several domains.To give a flavour, the book combines themes that are usually dealt with separately, be it laws, labour, religious figures, social activism or women's literature, and this is an incomplete list.In a short introductory chapter, Tanika Sarkar sets the tone for the volume as a whole by addressing existing trends in feminist scholarship in the field of history, as well as ideas about pre-modern gender.She does not follow those who would claim greater flexibility in gender regimes in pre-modern times that gave women more space compared to modernity, both because there is simply not the evidence to make such claims and, more importantly, because modernity saw much heterogeneity in gender relations and the rise of all manner of movements in the name of women and their rights.The title and subtitle of the volume strongly suggest that this will be a book where religion is going to be its central motif, as it affects the lives of women, with faith playing its part in the politics of gender.This is amply evident in the initial chapters of the book.Its historical beginning is squarely set in the closing decades of the 18th century, with the British colonial creation of personal laws, a subject that has been well covered by feminist historians.'Personal laws' were the domain for determining laws on marriage, divorce, family property, inheritance and succession, guardianship and adoption, and these were to be governed according to customary and scriptural prescriptions.The chapter chooses to sidestep the complex debates over how this very domain was created