Religion-based Family Laws, Corporate Kinship, and Wealth Accumulation in Modern India: a Sociological Investigation

On behalf of Prof. Christel Gärtner and Prof. Matthias Casper, you are cordially invited to attend the above-mentioned guest lecture by Prof. Anindita Chakrabarti from the University IIT Kanpur. Sociology professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in Kanpur, Prof. Chakrabarti is currently a guest researcher at the Excellence Cluster Religion and Politics. Her research area is in law and religion.

The talk is being held at 6:00 pm on Tuesday, 28 May in JO 101, Johannisstr. 4.

You may also join via Zoom:
https://uni-ms.zoom-x.de/j/64685944351?pwd=WHdCWEhFMUd6TVo3N3lCZy9lVHJDQT09

Meeting-ID: 646 8594 4351
Kenncode: 881844

Abstract: In India, religion-based family laws (also referred to as personal laws) function within the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom (articles 25-30). But they operate within a futuristic promise of  a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) also enshrined in the directive principles of the Constitution. In post-independence India, the UCC which is supposed to replace diverse religion-based family laws has become a short hand for gender justice, resolutely opposed to religious obscurantism in general and ‘Muslim misogyny’ in particular. In the recent decades Muslim personal law has been the cynosure of the debate on UCC and gender justice. Decentring the debate from an abstract notion of gender to the workings of family, kinship, and wealth transfer, the lecture draws attention to the intricacies of law in practice. Thereby it shows how the ideas of legal pluralism can offer a framework to reimagine the binary between cultural relativism of family laws and a statist UCC based on the ideal of ‘one nation, one law’.

Call for Papers

The First International Conference on Critical South Asian Death Studies, 18th-20th of April 2024 | University of Münster, calls for interdisciplinary presentations and performances by scholars in all stages of their careers, artists, practitioners, professionals, and activists whose research, poetry, prose, short films, or original performances reflexively engage with regimes of power as manifested in death, dying, mourning and end-of-life care.

In acknowledgement of differential capacities for movement and to ensure accessibility, the conference shall be held in a hybrid format.

Please click here for more information!

Abstracts/proposals (approximately 300 words) may be sent to: csads@uni-muenster.de by 15 October 2023 (11:59 PM CEST).

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