Abstract
The word ‘trouble’ seems to be a spectre in this book, in marriage, divorce, legal provisions, police stations, court rooms, mediation centres and feminist politics. Starting with her first book (2001) and her second (edited) book (2005) as well, Basu has been interested in feminist politics engaging law in India. This book is definitely an extension of the same genre, yet the distinctiveness lies in foregrounding courtroom ethnography as a method of engaging with the ‘everyday’ legal. This use of legal anthropology,both as a theoretical and a heuristic tool of research, will render this book useful to an interdisciplinary readership of researchers, teachers, activists, anthropologists, legal scholars, sociologists, gender studies, as well as feminists involved in the law-demanding and making processes.
This book has eight chapters. The introductory chapter, ‘Law, Marriage, and Feminist Reform’, documents how marriage has been the primary site of entitlement for women and how that entitlement gets circumscribed within kinship, labour and erotics of the nation state’s representation ofmarriage. Locating the connection between law and culture early in her book, through family courts, women’s grievance cells, family assistance cells and non-governmental women’s organisations (largely based in Kolkata), which provide legal assistance, the sense of the cultural as played out in the legal is made amply clear. Chapter 2, ‘Construction Zones: Marriage Law in Formation’, presents a historical journey and a discursive analysis of policy and legal documents. The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act (1939), the Hindu Code Bill (the 1950s), Towards Equality report (1974) and Lok Sabha debates on Family Courts Bill (1984) are some of the legal texts analysed to look at how ‘marriage is a pillar of nationalist stability, a necessary refuge or an incipient site of violence’ (p. 36). Chapter 3, ‘Beyond Equivalence: On Reading and Speaking Law’, is the key methodological chapter in this book, which looks critically at ‘lurking’ in the ‘field’—the Kolkata Family Court. Emphasising the limitations of courtroom observations and the challenges of working in a ‘public’ space (the courtroom), what Basu, however, highlights is how the ethnographer notices the role of emotion and cultural capital—the legal performance that happens through participatory hearing rather than only the teleology of judgement. This chapter reflects brilliantly on hearing as a method—mapping the contestations around speech, silence and action, none of which are necessarily only empowering or imposing. How is the legal language present in a lawyer-absent family court? How does the legal record/write a ‘life lived between languages’ (p. 68)? Basu eloquently articulates how translations are an important part of this language, ‘mistranslations’ (p. 70) or ‘missed’ (p. 69) translations are an inbuilt loss or maybe the only way towards optimal transfer. Through these words, silences and translations, sexual behaviour, consent and desire get talked about, erased and mediated. Chapter 4, ‘Justice without Lawyers? Living the Family Court Experiment’, is a thick description of the history and functioning of the Kolkata Family Court. Although, according to the Family Courts Act, a lawyer can be present in court only as amicus curiae, Basu documents that over time, litigants acquired a right to be represented by lawyers. However, merely altering the mode of litigation (which was attempted by substituting lawyers with counsellors) was not a sufficient condition to transform differential privileges of marriage or the contradictions inherent in using mediation for reconciliation.
Chapter 5, ‘In Sanity and in Wealth: Diagnosing Conjugality and Kinship’, is one of the rare expositions in Indian feminist research on practices and re-imaginations of kinship in the courtroom. Through her ethnographic analyses, Basu discusses how there is a legitimation of the (heterosexual) conjugal couple in courts and the ‘excess’ attached to maintenance during divorce, thereby validating gender and class privileges through marriage, while completely invisibilising women’s economic partnership in marriage by ‘settling’ maintenance amounts.
Chapters 6 (Sexual Property: Rape and Marriage Conjoined) and 7 (Strategizing Spaces: Negotiating the Violence outside the Domestic Violence Claims) revisit feminist movements’ claims and reclaims on rape and domestic violence. Basu explores situations where marriage appears as the other site of rape, drawing attention to the body and consent rather than the binary established through feminist campaigns on sexual agency and sexual victimisation, which have only re-inscribed the legitimacy of marriage through rape law reforms. Tracing the troubled everyday reality of domestic violence, Basu acknowledges that through sustained efforts of feminist campaigns, multiple spaces to pursue grievances have been created—police, courts, arbitration boards serving as quasi-courts, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and movement organisations. But what remains to be reflected upon is whether, by aiding individual women with economic arrangements, there has been any challenge to the moral (hetero-patriarchal) order of the state.
Throughout the book, there is an interesting use of popular movies like Mr and Mrs 55, Saat Pake Bnadha or lyrics from a Bangla music group. The themes explored in each of these were about the 1955 ‘divorce bill’, mutual separation, or a (false) case of domestic violence inflicted on a simple man when he objects to the divorce claimed by his wife. Through these, she argues that marriage and divorce are both apart and a part of each other. By concluding the book with an affirmative statement ‘The Trouble is Marriage: Conclusions and Worries’, Basu suggests that the institution of marriage is at the ‘core of gender trouble’ (p. 216) and marriage laws are a heavily contested site rather than a subversive one. Legal effect seems to write sex entirely as a commodity related to marriage and the ‘being’ of being in marriage as a primary form of property. The intertwined questions of labour, resource, kinship or consent seem to be still broadly absent in discussions around marriage laws. Vanita’s (1999) critique that the feminist movement has primarily tried to create a situation where a violent marriage becomes a less violent space without actually desiring/attempting to make marriages happy appears to be in dialogue with Basu’s final proposition about the impossibility of ‘good divorce’ despite contemporary policy changes. The creation of non-monogamous, non-marriage and non-heterosexual biological reproductive spaces as adequately social as well as common has been significantly absent and that requires reflection.