WOMEN IN LAW COURTS

ARCHIVES, PERFORMANCE AND LEGIBILITY

This panel examines women’s engagement with early modern and modern law courts. In projecting sovereign authority, the court is commonly understood as a male-dominated arena structured by fixed rules and masculinist norms. In contrast centering women’s relationship to courts reorients our very understanding of law and legal authority. By delving into undervalued archives, developing new methodological tools, and addressing the gendered approaches of history writing, this panel not only seeks to reassess women’s role in shaping the court, but also to reframe how we view law itself.

The court – understood as e.g., ʿadālat or kacaharī – unfolded plural realities and imaginaries of power. Rather than an immutable power structure, the panel engages the court as a variegated and protean space that women reinvested at different scales to assert their claims. From this perspective, we ask how women imagined and navigated official and nonofficial legal venues, not necessarily centered on the courtroom, to appeal to justice. What strategies did they develop to negotiate with legal authorities? The court is an arena of performance as well as of contestation. At the same time, law is an active category of discourses and debates. We therefore analyze how “courts” spatialized dialectical and dynamic fields of law and justice. As such, the discussion will investigate the language, material engagements, and positionalities that women used to define their rights when appealing to justice. The papers will also explore visual archives and gendered biographies of prominent feminine figures to reflect on how women’s presence in court and legal records interfaced with other spheres of representation. Finally, panelists will comment on the obstacles and possibilities for overcoming the problem of women’s invisibility in the archives, and hence in historical narratives.

Chair : Rohit De

Nandini Chatterjee

Where were the women? Efforts to imagine women in and around Mughal courtrooms

Barring talented princesses and objectified courtesans, the lives and thoughts of women of Mughal South Asia are hardly legible/visible. The problem of feminine insibility is even more acute when it comes to Mughal courtrooms, about which our knowledge is only preliminary. Extant documents suggest exclusively masculine spaces, peopled by male judges, male scribes, male guards and mainly male litigants and/or representatives. Were women, then, outsiders to law, as has been suggested even in other, more proximate contexts, or are we in need of imaginative reconstruction of legal spaces and episodes to locate women, if not necessarily in the courtroom, somewhere nearby, and highly aware of it? In answering this question, we might need to rethink the spatial limits of the courtroom itself, and re-situate it in scholarly and noble households, and see it less as a discrete space and more as a specific form of authority and mode of exercise of power. In this paper, I shall use documents recording specific low-level legal episodes from different locations around South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, to trial the ‘tracking of women in law’, commenting on the challenges and possible imaginative leaps necessary in order to create narratives that are comprehensible to us today.

Julia Stephens

Veiled Sightings: Tracing Janbai’s Visual and Embodied Presences and Absences across Legal, Family, and Museum Archives

Studies of trade, politics, and law in the western Indian Ocean often revolve around towering male figures, such as the Ismaili-Khoja business tycoon Tharia Topan. Women, such as his third wife, Janbai, have, at best, been mentioned in footnotes appended to histories of their more famous male relations. This paper inverts these optics by tracing Janbai’s presence and absence across legal, family, and museum archives. Janbai, the illiterate daughter of a fruit seller, amassed significant influence in the cosmopolitan worlds through which she traveled. The paper follows Janbai’s evolution from a girl peddling her wares in the alleyways of Zanzibar’s Stone Town, to a young wife petitioning the Aga Khan to bless her with sons, to a matriarch demanding that the Sultan of Zanzibar attend the wedding of her daughters, to a litigant battling her sons in courtrooms in Bombay. It finds her entanglement in networks of women in unexpected places, including a gold bracelet and photograph that she gifted to the wife of an American sea captain, now housed in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Triangulating between these different archives and spheres of influence suggests that women like Janbai used their visual presence and embodied consumption to exercise power in circuits of commerce, religion, politics, and law dominated by men engaged in textual exchanges. The paper considers how centering such visuality and embodiment unsettles frameworks of gendered agency that revolve around questions of voice and silence.

Melina Gravier

Law Courts and Economic Rights in North Indian Women’s Magazines

This paper examines how Hindi and Urdu women’s magazines might be interpreted as an archive for accessing ordinary women’s engagement with religious personal laws and their economic rights in late colonial India. With the expansion of the modern state, print technologies participated in raising legal consciousness in people’s daily lives. From the late nineteenth century, women’s magazines played a critical role in bringing legal discussions into everyday reading practices. Along with debates on social reforms, these magazines created variegated spaces that advised women on their rights, circulated summaries of court cases, and engaged women in legal discussions. This contributed not only to forging women’s understanding of “justice” (insāf), “rights” (huqūq) and the role of the court (‘adālat), but also to inculcating a sense of familiarity with law in women’s daily lives. In this context, women’s magazines such as Āwāz-e-Niswān, Dīdī or Chānd came to reflect and shape women’s legal consciousness. Recent scholarship has shown how legal discourses and imaginaries were constantly produced in everyday encounters. In this perspective, how did women make sense of law in their everyday experiences? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the relationship between financial (in)stability, religion and law in women’s quotidian lives. In the 1930s, the economic crisis, and the issue of indebtedness in particular, prompted women to reflect on their economic rights in religious laws and on legal and financial institutions that might address their concerns. In women’s magazines, contributors shared their everyday struggles and challenged legal and/or religious authorities, seeking to defend their economic rights. At the same time, they questioned the role of the court and its legitimacy in religious and family affairs, asserting a space for their own legal interpretation.

Apurva Prasad

She goes to court! Constructing authorship, authorial rights and reading publics in Mannu Bhandari vs. Kala Vikas Pictures (1985-86)

This project analyses how authorship is constructed at the intersection of law and literature and against a reading public in the landmark case Mannu Bhandari vs. Kala Vikas Pictures (1985-86). Renowned author of modern Hindi literature Mannu Bhandari argued that a vyāvasāik (commercial) cinematic adaptation of Āpkā Bunṭī or Your Bunty (1971) “mutilated” and “distorted” her celebrated novel. She was the first Indian citizen to invoke her authorial moral rights, and this case illuminated tensions around defining authorship. For instance, what is the “reputation” that Bhandari wished to protect? Why was she averse to a “commercial” adaptation of her novel? Legal studies on the case highlighted how the court verdict divorced an author’s economic rights from her moral rights and “balanced” the interests of Bhandari and the film production house. While invaluable, this legal scholarship does not delve into either Bhandari’s positionality in the case or that she did not ask for economic remuneration from the court, only the restoration of her nām (reputation/literary name) and adhikār (rights) over her novel. Additionally, an exclusively legal reading of the case does not really grapple with the tensions that emerge around gender, both in the court proceedings and Bhandari’s own marginal position as a woman author in the Nayī Kahānī or New Story (1950s-1970s) literary movement in northern India. This paper centers on Bhandari, who constituted herself simultaneously as a reputed author, “woman author, and international author in court, arguing that “authorship” is a fractured category. In court, Bhandari articulated her literary nām in firm opposition to the vyāvasāik lekhak (commercial writer). The anxiety of being perceived as a “commercial” author by her reading public prompts Bhandari to go to court, regain her adhikār over Āpkā Bunṭī, setting a nationwide precedent for authorial moral rights.