1. What is Patriarchy? Discuss the reasons for women’s subordination.

2. Critically analyse the centrality of the concept of patriarchy in feminist thought.

3. Explain the meaning of the term patriarchy as understood by feminist theory.
4. How do feminists understand and critique the nature of the Indian state? /Write
an essay on the feminist assessment of the nature of the Indian state./ Write an
essay on the feminist assessment of the nature of the Indian state.

PATRIARCHY
At its simplest, the term 'patriarchy' means the 'absolute rule of the father or the eldest male
member over his family'. Anglo-European anthropologists writing in the 19th century used the
term widely to connote a social system where men were family heads, descent was reckoned
through the father, men alone were priests and all laws and norms were dictated by what male
elders in that community held to be just and right.

However, today 'patriarchy' connotes an analytical category within the feminist discourse. The
transformation of patriarchy from a descriptive go analytical category happened in a specific
historical context - 1970's - that gave birth to a rousing feminist political and intellectual culture
in diverse global contexts. In course of time, women studies intellectuals invoked the term to
describe and comprehend a world where women are systematically disadvantaged.

Since that time, 'patriarchy' has been critically deployed to unpack the key constituents of
authority and power in any social system which automatically privileges men over women and in
which women can lay claims to material, sexual and intellectual resources only though fighting
for them. That is, in a patriarchal society, women have to struggle to be educated, have property
rights and choose their partners in marriages while for men these choices appear more or less
given and flexible.

According to V. Geetha, the punitive and productive aspects of patriarchy are interlinked and
glorify women as wives and mothers - those women who are not fertile are derided and their
civic status is delegitimized. Moreoften, women who do not wish to rest their civic identity on
their fertility and domestic status are ignored, humiliated and punished for being obdurate.

SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN

In the Indian context, scholars like Uma Chakravarty have conceptualised of 'Brahmanical
Patriarchy - where the 'structural relationship between the low castes subjected to the power of
the Brahmins and the Brahmin widow subjected to the power of brahmanical patriarchy'.​Madhu
Kishwar has highlighted the following ways in which patriarchy renders women
subordinate:​-
- alloting them a lack of resources both physical and intellectual eg land, education
-lack of access to instruments of labour which ACC to custom women are disallowed from
wielding
-control of their sexuality
-kin networks dictating marriage, living arrangements, household practices, patterns of
consumption
-household rules that privilege the eldest man as the head of the family
-lack of mobility
-a culture of self-effacement which women appear to practice willingly.

Culture and custom thus appear to be instrumental in women's subordination and economic
deprivation.The household, kinship networks, the state, caste structures,religion are all
highlighted by Kishwar as promoting the subordination of women

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE ORIGIN OF

PATRIARCHY
● PATRIARCHY AS A HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION - GERDA LERNER
One of the most coherent theories of masculinity and femininity has been outlined by Gerda
Lerner in ​The Creation of Patriarchy. L​ erner works with Engel's formulations as well as with the
insights provided by the theorists of patriarchy but subjects them to an original interpretation and
refiguring. Most important, she utilises these refigured arguments to examine evidence from
ancient societies. Based on this, she goes on to outline a theory of how women and men came to
live under patriarchy.

Lerner's arguments are based on evidence from archaeology and ancient law and art from
Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Assyria. She builds on the idea of women as objects of
exchange and goes on to point out that though women were less free than men, women did utilise
their positions of power or limited power to act, whether covertly or directly.

Lerner distinguishes between different sorts of female powerlessness. She notes that the position
of women was: expressed within degrees of unfreedom on a spectrum ranging from the slave
woman, whose sexual and reproductive capacity was commodified as she herself was, to the
slave-concubine whose sexual performance might elevate her own status or that of her children,
then to the 'free' wife whose sexual and reproductive services to one man of the upper classes
entitled her to property and legal rights.

Gerda Lerner's account of the subordination of women and the institution of masculine control
traces the creation of patriarchy through the following stages:

1. Men appropriated women's sexual and reproductive capacity through a complex process
involving abduction and sexual slavery.

2. The exchange and abduction of women created the basis for the control of their offspring as
well. The power of older men over women and children and their desire to safeguard their
resources for future generations may have provided an important impetus to the coming of
private property.

3. Later, as grain agriculture spread and kingdoms came to be established, law and legal
strictures were invented to perpetuate the patriarchal family system.

4. As men learnt to exercise control over women, they extended their authority over other
vulnerable groups: thus slavery emerged, in tandem with the growth of private property and the
spread of large scale grain cultivation.

5. While men's power was established and expressed through the control they wielded over the
mode of production, women could only get what they desired through the sexual ties they had
with men.
6. Even though women enjoyed no direct power, they continued to be venerated and worshipped
for their creative and fertile powers. Even after they were sexually and economically
disadvantaged, women continued to be priests, oracles and shamans.

7. Women could not really transcend their limited situations because men and the patriarchal
system systematically excluded them from education and access to different sorts of knowledge.

Lerner asserts that W​omen's History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of
women. And yet, most of the theoretical work of modern feminism, beginning with Simone de
Beauvoir and continuing to the present, has been ahistorical and negligent of feminist historical
scholarship. Lerner feels that while this was understandable in the early days of the new wave of
feminism, when scholarship on the past of women was scant, but in the 1980s, when excellent
scholarly work in Women's History is abundantly available, the distance between historical
scholarship and feminist criticism in other fields persists.

Lerner, a historian emphatically asserts that ​like men, women are and always have been actors
and agents in history. Since women are half and sometimes more than half of humankind, they
always have always been central, not marginal, to the making of society and to the building of
civilization. Women have also shared with men in preserving collective memory, which shapes
the past into cultural tradition, provides the link between generations, and connects past and
future.

Until the most recent past, historians have been men, and what they have recorded has been
neglectful of women’s contribution to history. Historical scholarship, up to the most recent past,
has seen women as marginal to the making of civilization and as unessential to those pursuits
defined as having historic significance. Thus, the recorded and interpreted record of the past of
the human race is only a partial record, in that it omits the past of half of humankind, and it is
distorted, in that it tells the story from the viewpoint of the male half of humanity only.

The tension between women's actual historical experience and their exclusion from interpreting
that experience is what ​Lerner has called "the dialectic of women's history." This dialectic
has moved women forward in the historical process. The contradiction between women's
centrality and active role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process
of interpretation and explanation has been a dynamic force, causing women to struggle against
their condition. According to Lerner, the coming-into consciousness of women becomes the
dialectical force moving them into action to change their condition and to enter a new
relationship to male-dominated society

​THE CRUCIAL DEBATES WITHIN INDIA ON PATRIARCHY

In the context of India, questioning women, who challenged the individual male caprice and
authority as well as the systems that produced these have always existed. Such information has
been gained from the ready access to women's writing from across the centuries which has
proven to be a rich archive that can be juxtaposed with specific problems and concerns.
Furthermore, historians have discovered a plethora of inscriptions on the temple walls, royal
documents and other public records regarding what women might have thought and said in the
past.

The decade of 1970s, with the intellectual and political changes, proved to be significant in
unearthing this jubilant past of women that wasn't restricted to merely their families and
communities but the larger world as well. Discussions of patriarchy in the Indian context came to
be sharply defined during this period.

-The Left militancy or referred to as Naxalism today in many parts of India, emerged in the late
1960s and the early 1970s. Women in these movements engaged in armed struggles along with
men for economic and social justice which included gender justice.

-The southern parts of India too saw the emergence of movements, comprising of a sprinkling of
women. committed to interrogating planned economic development as well as bringing about
social and economic changes that eventually led to the setting up of NGOs.

-Youths too, including young women, took to the streets to fight the corrupt polity and venal
politicians moved by the idealism of the old socialist JP Narayan.

-The women in 1974 laboured for a report that was produced by the government of India in 1974
which unpacked in a systematic manner the horrifying nature of discrimination faced by women
whilst giving far-reaching remedies that needed to take place for justice to be done to women.

-1975 saw politically and intellectually active women become part of the resistance movements
against a distinctly unpopular and authoritarian regime under Indira Gandhi that had declared the
country to be in a state of national emergency.

-Several communist militant movements suffered a backlash in terms of human rights activism in
the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of police terror. Many women were part of this
activism.

-In the 1970s yet another movement emerged called the Anti-price rise movement made visible
by frustrated home makers and their supporters. Poor and underprivileged women came together
for more viable economic options resulting in the formation of the now famous Self-employed
women's Association (SEWA).
-In 1975, an event resulted in a historic moment when the United Nations held the first
international women's conference in Nairobi, attended in great numbers by women from across
India which provided an impetus for loud thinking among politically active women on the
subject of patriarchy.

Thus, with such enthusiasm women traversed the decade of 1970s and sought to constitute their
own forums for public action in the early 1980s. This period brought forth issues of sexual
violence the most horrendous one being the Mathura rape case wherein the Supreme Court's
anti-gender justice judgment forced an incipient feminist movement into social visibility. Thus,
the definitions of patriarchy rose from this unique movement in time stirring the minds and the
activism of women and some men leading a practical expression and form of women's studies in
the 1980s that had earlier been mooted in the wake of intellectual ferment caused by the Towards
Equality report.

NATURE OF THE INDIAN STATE- PATRIARCHAL IN NATURE?

The Lancet, a British journal estimated in 2006 that as many as 10 million female fetuses had
been aborted in India over the previous 20 years. Addressing this issue, the Ministry of Women
and Child Welfare launched a national conference dedicated to 'Saving the Girl Child'. "No
Nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be a part of the civilised
world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by
women" stated India's former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

According to ​Vinay Bahl, to Indian feminists this demonstrates how the Indian society as well as
the state apparatus are patriarchal in nature. Notable instances quoted to advance this argument
point to the non-implementation of existing laws as well as a lack of real understanding and a
will to eliminate the patriarchal system that sustains these anomalies.

V. Geetha's 'Patriarchy' examines the role of the state, household, caste, religion, kinship,
customs, literature in contributing to the violence against women and subordinating them.
She points that class, caste, religious contexts and identities mediate the exercise of male
authority and it's working and resistance.

Geetha states that for India's ordinary citizens, the Indian state is a given:it frames their lives in
distinctive ways and is often the focus of their claims and demands, whether this has to do with
survival needs or with rights that are denied to them in other spheres of their lives.
The state is also viewed as a dispenser of goods and services that may otherwise not be easily
accessible to the poor and marginalised. Groups and movements that challenge the Indian state
or are opposed to the hegemonic ruling classes train their arguments at the state:- demanding
better laws and greater social and economic justice as well as complaints against the state's
highhandedness are addressed to the Indian state's institutions.

The courts are viewed as a bulwark against police violence against citizens, The legislature is
often urged to respond politically rather than seek formal legal resolution and the executive is
called upon to mediate civic justice issues, especially those relating to custom and caste.
As far as women are concerned, the state has often been viewed as the guarantor of their
constitutional rights, including the right to equality and justice.

The Indian state has constitutionally guaranteed that individuals will not be discriminated on the
basis of their sex (article 15) , would have equal access to public employment (article 16) and
civic liberties (article 19) and freedoms besides right to property (Hindu Code Bill) - institutions
such as the Central Social Welfare Board (concerned with maternal health and women's
education) were set up and hence at the eve of independence women looked to the emerging state
to ratify their claims to equality. However, many such as Amrit Kaur, Hansa Mehta and Renuka
Ray had been apprehensive about the state's non intervention in matters of religion which to
them invariably promoted customs of 'purdah, child marriage and polygamy, dedjciation of girls
to the temple etc.." (Sarkar, 1986)

Here, Geetha points out that the Indian state has largely seen its female citizens as dependents
and recipients of assistance rather than as citizens who had equal claims on the state's law and
resources. Further, since women's welfare was construed chiefly in terms of maternal and child
care, state policies merely affirmed commonsensical perceptions that understood women to be
socially useful as only views, mothers and caregivers.

Thus, the state appeared to tacitly acknowledge that women's claims to citizenship would only be
considered and affirmed within the familial and community terms. In other words, the claims of
women as citizens would be measured, mediated and if necessary subsumed in the claims made
on their persons and liberty by their families.

This contradictory attitude to women persisted even in the post- globalisation neoliberal 21st
century which created conditions for the perpetuation of public patriarchy.

Here Geetha, Uma Chakravarty and other Indian feminist scholarship has argued that the Indian
state has served as agent of public patriarchy.
LAW CIVIL JUSTICE AND WOMEN- COURTS AS AGENTS OF PUBLIC PATRIARCHY
Feminist engagements with the law have been richly diverse: critical discussions of
constitutional law; analyses of particular laws and;court judgments; theoretical debates on equal-
ity, justice and liberty in terms of what they mean to women. In each of these instances, feminists
have pointed out that the law is less unequivocal than it is assumed to be, especially in matters
pertaining to women’s equality and liberty.

Ratna Kapur and Brenda Crossman have drawn attention to the manner in which the salient
articles of the Indian Constitution relating to non-discrimination against women and
relating to non-discrimation against women and which affirm, the equality of all are interpreted
in the courts. They point out how courts veer between a formal arid a substantive
understanding of equality. The f​ormal position works in two ways: in the first instance it is
understood that all individuals are equal and by this token, ​women do not deserve special
concessions in the form of reservations and neither are men to be awarded rights that are
easily and for no good reason denied -to women. The converse position holds that women
are ‘naturally’ different from men, and so need not be treated equally, rather they need to
be ‘protected’ in their own interest by the law and the courts.

Based on their extensive analyses of case law and judgments, ​Kapur and Crossman note the
following: ‘Within the framework of constitutional law, equality rights have not always
been receptive to women’s claims. Dominant understandings standings of gender difference
gender differences often operate to preclude any substantive interrogation of this historic
disadvantage’.

FOR EG, THEY CITE:-

1) In a particular case involving the issue of adultery, the petitioner had argued that Indian law
with respect to adultery was discriminatory, since it granted a husband the right to prosecute an
adulterer (who had a relationship with his wife), but disallowed the same right to the wife (whose
husband had a relationship with another woman) The judge dismissed the petition and argued
that, men are more likely to commit adultery than women, arid women who are caught'
in this act are more often than not victims.
2) Crossman and Kapur note that this understanding of adultery assumes that the wife -is .the
husband’s property, and that if she is rendered vulnerable, he has to protect her, the home and his
honour, and so he.is allowed to prosecute his wife’s lover ​Kapur and Crossman​ refer to other
dominant notions of gender that underwrite legal opinion; conjugal-rights that 'men and women
enjoy in each other are given, natural rights(there is no question of marital rape in India, as in
someother countries; besides, the refusal to consummate or non-consummation is a ground for
divorce); that women cannot but be wives and mothers (they are naturally inclined towards these
roles); that the sexual division of labour which allocates to women and men very different roles
and responsibilities is a given, natural state and cannot be altered (that is, they are not seen as a
product of history). These notions are carried over into laws and arguments, and thus the state,
or at least its judicial aspect, actively reproduces popular biases and arguments against female
equality and dignity.

THUS, dominant notions of gender difference actively undercut the secular idea of equality and
the courts, as aspects of the state, facilitate such an undercutting.

3) Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay ​ has undertaken a detailed study of the cases filed in West Bengal
- Mukhopadhyay notes that it is not so much the letter of the law that is important, as the
meanings it gathers in and through court transactions. Judges and lawyers, she points out, are not
impervious to the claims of custom and usage. Mukhopadhyay notes that once the state takes on
this role, it also automatically invests itself with a certain discretion- ary moral authority to
explain, interpret and tell the woman what is best for her. In doing so, it thus comes to define a
series of measures: to test the woman's 'fitness' for being deemed a victim in need of protection
and to review her status as a wife, daughter, or , sister, as the case maybe to better understand
and judge her claims of being wronged and in need of legal succour
PATEMAN’S SEXUAL CONTRACT - THE KINSHIP CONTRACT IN INDIA
Carole Pateman has described the sexual contract as one that guarantees men authority over
women, even as it enables and proclaims equality between men. She notes that women were not
party to the original social contract, which men drew up with each other—in
eighteenth-century Europe and America—to create a free and open society, the basis for modern
democracy.

This was because women were not seen as individuals' in the sense men were understood to be
individuals (they were women, and men were the measure of humanity); further, women were
(and continue to be) part of other contracts, the marriage contract that allowed men free and
complete access to their wives (in many societies marital rape is not a crime or even
acknowledged as a violation); the prostitution contract that defined—and defines—women's
bodies as equally available to all men (there is no question of a 'free’ sale of sex, according to
Pateman, because it is as women and not as -free individuals that women enter prostitution. As
women their bodies are already marked in a particular way, and this renders them secondary and
subordinate); the contract for surrogate motherhood, by which women contract to ‘rent’ their
wombs, which alienates women’s reproductive capacity and transforms them into child-bearing
creatures.

In the Indian context,- the sexual contract is most vividly present in the social value placed on
women’s fertility on the one hand and on the unmarried woman’s virginity on the other. In both
instances, the sexual contract is informed by laws of kinship and caste, and so it is at once both
sexual and social, an intimate and civic matter. Prostitution, sanctified by custom, though
punishable in law, is discreetly invoked in and .through the sexual rights that men grant
themselves, and in the forced bondages of entire castes of women.

THUS, women’s rights to equality are constantly undercut by perceptions of their femininity and
sexuality. So women remain essentially ‘sexed’ beings, denizens of the home and (caste)
community, and not of the republic. Household, kin and caste networks, rather than the spaces of
the polity determine their life choices. In other words, in the Indian context, the kinship contract
that men forge with each other intersects with the sexual contract that binds women to men in
particular ways to exclude women from the democratic contract.Rape or sexual assault is seldom
viewed as a violation of a woman’s bodily being and integrity. Instead, it is consistently linked to
her chastity, rather her virginal or non-virginal status, as the case may be (virginity is both a
marker of family honour as well as a prized virtue for those who wish to heed caste norms).
Thus, the Indian penal code is circumspect in its definition of rape: only penile penetration
constitutes evidence of the crime. Other forms of sexual hurt, including with weapons, or the
reiterative use of language, or the rape without consent of a sexually unwilling wife are not
considered tantamount to the act of rape.
Once again, we see how a woman's bodily being is constituted in and through her status as a
potentially fertile person, her social as well as familial status hinges on her capacity to bear her
husband’s child and an act that compromises this, or which makes it difficult for her to live up to
the vocation that society has deemed to be hers is considered criminal on this account.
Rape, in this sense, is perceived as worse than death by society and not as an act of power and
violence.

Flavia Agnes has also pointed out that rape sentences are also filled with patriarchal attitudes,
citing the Kerala HC 1992 decision on gangrape - she quotes that the ' ‘The court must
compensate the victim for the deprivation of the prospect of marriage and a serene family life,
which a girl of her kind must have, looked forward to". Recent decisions of Karnataka HC
(2020) raising questions on whether the victim should have been drinking accompanied by
requests of rapists to marry the victims enumerate how in India the kinship contract and the
sexual contract induce distinct forms of public patriarchy.

POPULATION CONTROL IN INDIA:REPRODUCTIVE CONTROL OF WOMEN’S BODIES

V. Geeth then elaborates the state’s collusion with familial norms as evident in its family
planning activities and states that it denies active citizenship to women and instead includes them
within the polity only as mothers. Independent India’s family planning programme was arguably
one of the largest public health initiatives in modern societies. It was based on the idea that a
growth in population is detrimental to national progress and that control of numbers is essential
if the state’s economic and social plans were to benefit its citizens equally. This understanding
was based on nineteenth-century notions of progress and growth termed ‘Malthusian’ after the
economist Thoman Malthus. ​The distinguishing features of India’s family planning policies
especially as these obtained in the 1970s were ​(a) targeting women in their reproductive years,
urging them to use contraceptives; (b) addressing couples and persuade them to adopt the
two-child per family norm; (c) setting numerical targets for government health workers, thereby,
putting the onus on them to identify and persuade potential couples of the merits of birth control

For one, women, especially poor and often ignorant women who thronged the public health
services in rural and even urban India, were often forcibly sterilized or had intrauterine devices
(IUDs) fitted into them soon after they had borne a second child, or sometime even after their
first delivery. In some’ instances, women were not even told of what had been done to them and
only when they reported back to the hospital with bleeding and other symptoms of prolonged use
of IUDs did they realize that they had been victims of state planning.

In some cases, especially in the 1980s, women themselves approached the health services
requesting birth control support, and this led to their being used as guinea pigs for testing
injectible contraceptives and implants. While the state claimed it had the 'consent' of the women
in carrying out these tests, women’s groups, alarmed at the deteriorating health of women
pointed out that this could not be ‘informed consent’ and therefore amounted to coercion.
• Women activists also demanded that men be made party to family planning decisions and that
they be persuaded to adopt control methods as well. Further, the infamous episode of Turkman
Gate in Delhi—in the mid 1970s when Muslim men were targeted by Indira Gandhi’s state and
forcibly sterilized—had left a bitter aftertaste in public consciousness as regards male
sterilization. In the event, women were left to bear the burden of the state’s policies.

Similarly, ​Agnes ​points out that the state's promotion of the two child policy also had averse
effects on women who were now burdened to produce male heirs - this led to the practice of
sex-selective abortion. Writing on women's health, ​Geetha​ concludes that the state monitored
the health status of its women citizens chiefly in terms of maternal health and thus only within
the confines 'of good mothers' ​Rachel Kumar ​also observes that this 'mother-child dyad' could
not be separated in the eyes of the state and that : ‘In the end, women’s instrumentality as
mothers underscores their invisibility as persons within the state. What it entails is that these
conceptualizations limit the state’s interests in women’s long-term welfare’(Kumar 2002).

GOVERNANCE AND FEMALE CITIZENSHIP

Indian feminists, in the post 1970s period, theorized the state’s ‘oversight’ with regard to women
as an instance of a gender-blind approach to planning. They argued that the entire idea of
economic growth and social development must be re-thought from the point of view of India’s
women. One of the areas . that some of them took up to critique- was the Indian state’s famous
Green Revolution strategy to increase agricultural yield.
Maria Mies, Bina Agarwal, Govind Kelkar et al ​have pointed out that the revolution not only
increased the disparity in Indian agriculture, it also restricted women's access to the village
commons which were often taken over by rich farmers. It did not account for women's food
gathering labour. ​Prem Chowdhury'​s work on Haryana showed how labour relationships,
spending patterns and changing marriage ties strengthened and augmented existing patriarchal
arrangements.

PATRIARCHAL STATE
The patriarchal nature of the state has been criticized from other points of view as well: for eg,
one view states that if developmental reasoning ignored and devalued women-centred
subsistence farming, then political reasoning overlooked women’s capacity 'for public work and
tor politics.' In 1997, a conference held in the city of Dindigul in Tamil Nadu on the theme, ​'50
years of Indian independence: Women and Political Participation’​ -brought together women
from various political parties and trade unions to discuss how they saw their roles in their
respective organizations, and how the latter viewed their presence. Interestingly, the conference
deliberations revealed that in almost all contexts, women were not viewed as effective citizens or
public figures. In other words, women's rights and the question of political entitlements were not
considered a legitimate part of a larger political agenda. Thus, Indian feminists asserted that the
original patriarchal division of the worlds into domestic and public had been carried over into the
political realm as well.

In an overall patriarchal system men utilize familial, kin and caste networks and class power to
consolidate their public presence and authority. Women cannot work these networks to their
advantage as men can, given the vulnerable positions they occupy in kin and caste networks:
women’s identities' are always already fractured and contradictory, just as their residence and
daily living is. Caught between natal and marital ties and distanced from their natal kin by the
distance of their marital homes, at least in northern and northwestern India, they are not in a
position to wield the kinship contract to their advantage as well as men can. The Indian state is
not exempt and demonstrates an unexamined patriarchal bias.