Between Family and Nation State: Revisiting The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Abstract

Rajosmita Roy: Your study centers around understanding the historical process through which the system of family law in the Hindu Code Bill came to be de fi ned and embedded as a legislative marker of the modern nation state. It is this imagining of modernity between the colonizer and the nation builders that you bring into question through the trajectory of the codi fi cation of this bill. How would you analyze the changes and con-tinuities in conjugal ties through the economy, citizenship and secularism nexus that you place at the heart of the Hindu Code Bill debates?