About lalithaSridhar and how she dead
Answers
Explanation:
An anthropologist on Muslim women and their marriages
It is possible the author and publisher scheduled the release of this important book to the hearing on a batch of seven petitions, including five filed by Muslim women, challenging the validity of triple talaq by a constitution bench of the Supreme Court, which concluded on May 17 this year, with the judgment reserved by the five justices. If they did not, its arrival is prescient. Sylvia Vatuk’s Marriage and its Discontents: Women Islam and the Law in India is a deceptively slim volume that cuts straight to the voices and concerns of Indian Muslim women, who otherwise have to be heard over the clamour of media headlines and the intense political colour personal laws attract in India.
Vatuk, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has studied family structures, history and law in the context of gender roles in India for over three decades (the endnotes for each essay run to several packed pages). She bases this book on 10 years of research in Chennai and Hyderabad, which limits its geography, but achieves universality by drawing upon extensive interviews with Muslim women, government-appointed qazis, lawyers, judges, court staff, counsellors and advocates, to arrive at when and how legal or extra-judicial remedies are sought over the breakdown of a marriage.
The second chapter (‘Muslim Women and Personal Law’) is thus inseparable from the dynamic context Vatuk explains objectively, relying on detailed case notes and including insightful sections on paternalism in the administration of Muslim Personal Law, the evolution and role of Islamic feminism in reforming it, the contentious issues surrounding maintenance, and the little understood khul (wife-initiated divorce, which the author was surprised to discover is ‘...many times the number awarded by the courts’). Two valuable essays depart entirely from discontentment in wedlock to examine what happens before a marriage is contracted—they offer perspective on the impact of endogamy, dowry and gift-giving, and on her research into a still-ongoing family history project dating back to 1800.