Women and Property in Colonial India

Some sources to consult:

* Kumkum Sangari, "The 'Amenities of Domestic Life': Questions on Labour," Social Scientist 21.9 (Sept/Oct 1993): 3-46.

This article deals with the problems of property, inheritance, and labor that came about as colonial legal institutions attempted to codify certain customary marriage practices as normative. Alongside the colonial transformation of the family, new manuals on women's etiquette and behavior attempted to extract as much labor as possible from new domestic arrangements. Thanawi's BIHISHTI ZEWAR is seen as part of that process.

* Gail Minault, "Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and 'Huquq un-Niswan': An Advocate of Women's Rights in Islam in the Late Nineteenth Century," Modern Asian Studies 24.1 (Feb. 1990): 147-172.

This article traces the career of another Deobandi text (Huquq un-Niswan) and its relationship to women's reform in the nineteenth century. Ali's text goes beyond the traditional Deobandi interest in the abolition of customary practices (at one point Minault calls the text "revolutionary") to "equip Muslim women with a reaffirmation of their equality with men as human souls and with a reformulation of their rights in Islamic law" (150). Of particular interest may be his argument that veiling was a historical necessity rather than a moral injuction, and that there is nothing in the Qur'an which prevents women from public mobility or public presence.