Women's Rights Issues Among Bombay Parsis: A Legal Anthropologist's Thoughts on Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia

I focus in this essay on legal issues related to women's rights in the British colonial period that are discussed in Mitra Sharafi's 2014 book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Parsi leadership actively lobbied for laws related to intestate inheritance, women's property rights, divorce, and child marriage that were consistent with their community's customary values and practices. During the same period, legal reform movements were also underway on behalf of Hindu and Muslim women and, to a lesser extent, Christian women. This essay highlights some of the common themes in those movements and discusses, in particular, the similarities and differences in what was achieved for Parsi women and their Hindu sisters, as they and their respective male leaders traversed the road toward greater gender equality under the law.