Kerala 2005 - of Planning Commission

CHAPTER 7
RECKONING CAUTION: EDUCATED UNEMPLOYMENT AND GENDER UNFREEDOM
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Box 7.6: Conserving Prosperity in the Patriline:
Syrian Christian and Islamic Reforms
Unlike the Nambudiris or the Nairs, the Syrian Christians
experienced a distinct rise in their economic fortunes
since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet here too, property
reform was motivated by the need to conserve economic
prosperity by strengthening patriliny. The Travancore
and Cochin Christian Succession laws (1916 and 1921,
respectively) excluded daughters from the right to inherit
property and restricted their claim to a dowry that was to
be one-third (Cochin) and one-fourth the share of a son
or Rs 5,000 whichever was less. Widows were restricted
to limited interest that was to lapse upon remarriage
(Kodoth, 2002b). The Mappilla Marumakkatayam Act
1939, provided that separate property of matrilineal
Muslims in Malabar would devolve according to Islamic
law and an amendment in 1963 extended the statute
to all of Kerala and brought devolution of ancestral
property as well under the Shariat (Derrett, 1999). These
reforms were underpinned by a local-level campaign and
undermined women’s claims to property as the Shariat
gave them less than their brothers were entitled to.
as evident for instance in the struggle to endow women
with a ‘respectable’ dress code. Lower caste and agrarian
struggles questioned the feudal rights that upper caste men
had over lower caste women but well within a framework
of patriarchal rights of lower caste men.
The Hindu Code of 1956, including separate laws on
marriage and succession, was made applicable to
all ‘Hindus’, though the Nambudiris and matrilineal
groups from Kerala were exempted from certain clauses
(Agarwal, 1994). Interestingly, the volume of reform
activity in the legal sphere among the Hindus has stood
in contrast to the reluctance of the post-independent State
to reform Muslim or Christian personal laws. Despite
repeated pleas for reform, the marriage and divorce
laws of the Christians enacted in the nineteenth century
and plagued by highly gender discriminatory clauses
continue to stand (Agnes, 1999). The Supreme Court
decision in 1986 that repealed these laws in favour of
the more gender equitous Indian Succession Act 1925
was met with strong and organised resistance from the
community and the Church. It is also instructive that
few women so far have been able to risk community
displeasure and take advantage of it (Jaisingh, 1997).
3.3 Women’s Property Rights
In order to develop a cogent account of gender disparity in
property rights in contemporary Kerala, we need to think
of ownership of and access to property in association with
the practices that confer property right and the processes
that transform property practices. Inheritance rights, dowry
transfer, gifts and access to independent incomes are some
avenues of acquiring property right. Clearly, customs
that regulate inter-generational transfer of property are
gender-differentiated. They are also closely associated with
the organisation of marriage. Combined with pervasive
female disadvantage in access to earned incomes through
employment, they constrain women’s ability to claim
ownership and exercise control over property even in the
face of equitable laws.
Let us consider land rights first. Kerala’s admittedly
far-reaching radical land reforms bypassed married
women’s independent rights to land through the family
route (Saradamoni, 1980; Agarwal, 1994). Longer term
expectations for women of indirect gains too have been
belied, if we consider that women have gained much less
than men or have been affected adversely in terms of access
to non-farm employment or inter-generational transfers of
land (Kodoth, 2004a). Significantly, a study in three urban
and three rural settings in Thiruvananthapuram district
found that only 21 per cent of women had title to land.
However, 30 per cent of the women owned a house (Panda,
2003: 60). Analysis of data on operational holdings of men
and women in Kerala in Table 7.12 indicates the extent
to which they are recognised as managing or controlling
land. 11 According to provisional data from the agricultural
census of Kerala 1995-96, women hold less than a third of
the number and area of operational holdings of men but also
that as the size of holdings increase, women’s share of the
number of holdings and area declines. Disparity in women’s
landholding is more pronounced when we turn to the area
of holdings. In the above 10 hectares category, women
hold less than 10 per cent of total operational holdings and
less than 5 per cent of the area of operational holdings.
It may be inferred that there are strong restrictions on the
recognition of (if not actual) control of land by women.
Significantly, there was no substantial difference in gender
11 The agricultural census takes the household, i.e., a commensal unit, as the unit of enumeration. As members of a single
household are not recognised as joint holders, individual holdings stand in for households. Further operational holdings do not
refer to title or ownership as they include owned and tenanted holdings.