The preceding segment highlights the structural restraints of the existing legal framework within which rights are constituted. In the case at hand the creation of the ‘right’ to property for women in India focuses on their religious identity and locates their title within the family. This segment emphasizes the need to move beyond positive law and the enunciation of rights within it, and to take account of women’s particular locations and the constitutive realities of their lives. The perception of legal pluralism assists this, and thus becomes important to any critical consideration of legal rules and procedures. Legal pluralism is the broad perception within which ‘law’ is implicit as being multi-locational, with various centers of power beyond the state to include the family and other social structures beyond the state. As such, the rules which drag individuals are not only codified law, but habitual practices, religious rules and other social norms.
Legal pluralism furthers the analysis of rights within law by accounting for the normative role of religion in women’s lives. In the background of our discussion a legal pluralist approach pushes us beyond expectations to a critical investigation of the normative effect of ‘Hindu’ law. It allows us to discover the extent to which ‘Hindu’ law ‘exist as social fact because it receives social observance’.
The acknowledgment that there is governing or a normative system other than formal law that affects and control people’s lives are central to a legal pluralist approach. The operation of legal rules and the sources of law and legal principle must be critically studied to understand the interrelationship between law and women’s lives.
This understood us that, In addition to conformist legal sources such as case law, statutes, subordinate legislation, legal philosophies in textbooks and articles, the provisions which directly impact the position of women are prepared, are also studied. Examples of such face are the family, the office, the church community, the local courts and organizational agencies.
This perception obtains a wider scope for the consideration of law than from a positivist position, for law is seen as a rule-making and rule-preservation process that takes place in various places.
On rural women’s rights to land in India, therefore, our analysis must include the consideration of all three: statutory rules, the operation of Hindu religious norms, and the evaluation of norms drawn from women’s social and cultural realities. In their relation to land possession women are ruled by a combination of legal, social, religious and cultural customs, principles and associations.
To study the role and influence or effectiveness of one of these, namely statutory norms, is to overlook the essential inter-linkages and impacts of others. It also follows that, in order to embark upon a process of increasing gendered access to resources through law, a more broad understanding of the ways in which the law may or may not facilitate this is essential.
This prevents the exclusive stress on statutory law and avoids wrong assumptions of its overruling power, allowing for more informed methods to be implemented. Such methods would take into account the exact interdependence and interconnection of cultural values, religious rules, gender thought and social organization in order to appraise the concentrated efficiency of the legislative norm.
Legal pluralism reports the critique of free-thinking by providing the source for law to shift its focus from the public world to those grounds which are significant in their regulation of individual’s personalities. The question of property rights, in particular, is subject to many normative disciplines frameworks. For example, the issue of inheritance and succession rights for Hindu women derives directly from the Hindu concept of ‘family’, as the property in question does not disturb distinctions made in Hindu law between familial and personal property. The effect of this is to make stronger and continue the operation of the family and its specific forms in regulating property titles.
Thus the gender belief operating here is directly derived from rules and notions related to the ‘family’. For a huge majority of women in the world the family/household is where they carry out their daily activities and by extension where they are most regulated. Women may in different places be subject to different regulatory norms at different times within the family. What is essential is that these must be recognized, analyzed and addressed. A legal pluralist perspective is vital to develop a broader conceptualization of gendered viewpoints within law in a variety of contexts.
Hence, the immense amount of question arises in our mind and that must be biggest problem or obstacles for women to access their property.
- What is the individuality of the women in small peasant household in their familial and social context?
- Up To what level can such identity provide accommodations or build a genuine connection to land rights?
- In what ways it activates to describe and maintains view of lawfulness of women’s right to proprietorship?
- In what manner do ideas of ‘legal’ norms rest upon socio-cultural concepts?
These questions need to be further examined in developing rights-based approaches to gender equality in property rights and to find the solution of the above mention question answer is the biggest challenge for our legal system.
