Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Hindu marriage act“

Marriage is a social combination or lawful contract between the general population that makes family relationship and its definition fluctuates as indicated by various societies. Marriage and Kinship are the essential unavoidable truths that apply to everyone of any person. The present paper is about the Kinship and Marriage structure among the Hindu people group in the Kishtwar District. The investigation has explicitly investigated the act of cross-cousin relational unions among the network and has endeavoured to investigate the different family relationship ties predominant among them. This paper is an attempt to investigate the family relationship and marriage structure among the Hindu people group in Kishtwar. The paper likewise accomplishes to investigate the different types of cross-cousin marriages among the Hindu people group in Kishtwar.

The introduction of modern concepts like adulthood and sanctity given to individual rights has legally turned the individual settlement of marriage between two consenting adults to be legitimate. Under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955, except for certain incest taboos, the legal restrictions on marriage of two adult Hindus are almost non-existent. Briefly speaking, this means that under the law both sagotra (same gotra) and inter-caste marriages are permitted. Yet, the customary rules regulating marriages in most parts of north India are based upon caste endogamy, village and clan exogamy. While keeping within caste, they adopt the gotra or got, as is known in rural north India, rule of exogamy (gotra are an exogamous patrilineal clan whose members are thought to share patrilineal descent from a common ancestor). For marriage certain prohibited degrees of kinship have to be avoided. As a rule three or four got exogamy is followed by most caste groups upper or lower. Any break in this, though legally allowed, is not acceptable.

The British Government passed the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1929. The Act is popularly known as the Sarda Act. The Act fixed the minimum age of marriage of girls and boys at 14 and 18 years, respectively. The jurisdiction of the Act was confined to British India alone. However, much before the British Government restrained child marriage, few Princely States had already banned child marriages. However, Hyderabad State could not ban child marriages. This article describes how the British-Andhra subjects performed child marriages in the territories of Hyderabad State to escape punishment for violating the Sarda Act. The subjects of the Hyderabad State clearly felt that the Andhra people were ‘defiling’ their ‘sacred territories’ by performing child marriages. This also intensified the demand for a ban on child marriage in the Hyderabad State. Women intellectuals, both Hindu and Muslim, were in the forefront in making the demand. The paper is based exclusively on primary sources. Newspapers and women’s journals in the Telugu vernacular such as the Golakonda Patrika, Andhra Patrika and Grihalakshmi, and autobiographies of Telangana intellectuals like Konda Venkata Ranga Reddy are used.

Abstract India secured its independence from the British rule in 1947. Vietnam eliminated the presence of foreign military forces in 1975. Both countries have faced adversity through subjugation. The similarity does not end here. The family unit in both nations is given primary precedence and importance, as it is considered to be the nucleus of the society. However, while Vietnam regulates matrimony through the uniform code of Law on Marriage and Family, 2014, India does not have a uniform code. India is a secular country where different religions are practiced freely. Matrimonial laws in India are governed by the personal laws of the parties depending on their religion, codified under different statutes, viz. Hindu Marriage Act, 1955; Muslim law; Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872; Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936; and Special Marriage Act, 1954. This paper will compare the status of matrimonial laws in India and Vietnam with an attempt to answer the question as to whether it is advisable to reconcile different personal laws under a uniform code for India.

The concept of property is evolving from the days of adopting the law relating to property of Hindu people. The laws relating to property undergoes many changes from time to time as to accommodate the changing need of the society. The major changes in the law of property held after the adoption of our Constitution. The Article 14 of the Constitution of India guarantees equality among men and women as a fundamental right. Following by Article 15 which allows special provisions can be made for women and child. Article 19 1(f) which said that right to property was a fundamental right, which later on amended and now property is a legal right under article 300A of the Constitution of India. Article 39(f) which is directive principle also concern about the safeguard of the child. The court observed that right to property is not only a constitutional right but also a human right1, and no person can be deprived of his property save and except by and in accordance with law. Due to Constitutional guarantees the legislature has brought Hindu Succession Act in 19562 and Hindu Marriage Act in 19553 along with three other Acts. Hindu Succession Act has amended and codified the law relating to intestate succession4. This Act has laid down a uniform and comprehensive system of inheritance of property. Moreover this Act gave rights to women to property which were unknown till then. The provision of this Act in relation to property is clear for legitimate child, but is silent for illegitimate child. The paper will focus on the right of illegitimate progeny to maintenance from their parents as well as right of inheritance to their parents self acquired as well as ancestral property in a Hindu family.

Laws are basically made with the aim of creating security and order in people's lives. Although the law was made to bring order to life, but in reality there are still many people who break them. One of the acts that often happens in society today is the exploitation of children. One of the cases of child exploitation that occurred as a case of child sexual abuse. The contributing factors are internal factors (such as the proximity of the perpetrator to the victim) and external factors (such as being away from the crowd). Because of that, efforts to protect children really need to be done. According to Law Number 23 of 2002, a child is given protection from the womb until he is 18 (eighteen) years old. In this regard, in Hinduism we can also find a legal term known as dharma. Hindu law is divided into two, namely public law (Kantaka Sodhana or Hindu criminal law) and private law (Dharmasthiya or Hindu civil law). The Kantaka Sodhāna can be seen in a subjective sense (ius puniedi) and in an objective sense (ius poenale). Then, regarding the crime of sexual violence against children is not specifically regulated in Hindu law, but the relationship made between men and women who do not have legitimate ties of marriage (marriage), then this act is a crime called Lokika Sanggraha. Therefore, acts of sexual violence against children can be likened to the act of Lokika Sanggraha. In this regard, in Article 171 Ekadaso'dhyayah Mānava Dharmaśāstra, the deed can be blamed and threatened with imprisonment for 12 (twelve) years. The term tapa must be interpreted as imprisonment because in a state a person is imprisoned as suffering as a hermit.

In India, the societal opinion on marriage has historically been very conservative; divorce is considered to be taboo. Being in line with such views, personal laws are shaped in India in such a way where judges are directed to be very paternalistic; to try their best at reconciliation first. This is clearly mentioned in both, the Hindu Marriage Act[i] and the Special Marriage Act[ii]. In addition, similar provisions relating to the restitution of conjugal rights exist throughout various personal laws[iii]. Jani & Anr. v. Mohammed Khan[iv] and Monshee Bazloor v. Mohammed Khan[v]are some examples of Muslim personal law providing such a matrimonial relief of restoration of cohabitation. Owing to this deeply rooted relief in Indian law, there are a majority of cases which have come to Court requesting this decree to be passed. A majority of these cases have been ruled in favour of the party petitioning for restitution of conjugal rights. However, keeping in mind the changing times and the recent debate on the right to privacy[vi], the law must adapt to the new sentiments of its citizens. Numerous petitions have come about, arguing that such a law is archaic and in violation of the constitutional right to privacy, the most recent one in front of the Supreme Court being Ojaswa Pathak v. Union of India[vii] (2019-date). This topic has become the basis of a debate among Courts. Therefore I explore the question, ‘Should restitution of conjugal rights be retained or removed?’ Restitution of conjugal rights is a matrimonial relief provided to spouses of a valid marriage[viii] under Indian law. The aim of such a law was the idea that the people in a marriage are entitled to the consortium of each other; comfort, affection and aid. This was believed to be fundamental to the institution of marriage. Section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 states, “When either the husband or the wife has, without reasonable excuse, withdrawn from the society of the other, the aggrieved party may apply, by petition to the district court, for restitution of conjugal rights and the court, on being satisfied with the truth of the statements made in such petition and that there is no legal ground why the application should not be granted, may decree restitution of conjugal rights accordingly.” Let us break this down and understand what this actually means.

Hindu women's legal right to inherit property has been restricted from the earliest times in Indian culture. In the ancient text Manusmriti, Manu writes: “Her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth and her sons protect her in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.” However, women were not always excluded from inheriting movable or immovable property from ancestral and marital families. But their proportion of share in the property was far less than that of their male counterparts.Throughout history, restrictions on Hindu women's property rights have undergone change, and current laws governing these rights are more liberal than those of ancient Hindu society. Patriarchal Hindu society provided women with property known as stridhan (literally, women's property or fortune), and it mainly came from marriage gifts (clothes, jewelry, and in some rare cases, landed properties). However, women were denied property rights to the ancestral or marital landed property, and their right over succession of the landed family property was limited. With the emergence of different schools of Hindu law, the concept of stridhan started expanding its literal and legal meaning, granting women more rights to certain forms of property. Later, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the passage of several pieces of legislation that were intended to remove more of the barriers to full and equal property rights for Hindu women. Most recently, sexual discrimination in Hindu succession rules was mostly discontinued by the recent Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act (2005).

Most people at first from the courtship to the marriage level usually pay less attention to the causes and effects that will arise in the household, they consider it normal, only based on consensual feelings and sometimes only based on sexual desire. The function of marriage or wiwaha is an effort to realize the life goals of Grhasta Dormitory. A faithful relationship should last until death, in short it is made as the highest law by husband and wife. In the Manawa Dharmasastra literature, it is explained that marriage is a sacred act (sacrament, samskara), which is an engagement between two parties who fulfill God's commands and suggestions, so that family life and neighboring relatives run well in accordance with Hindu religious teachings. However, nowadays there are still many divorce cases and the cases are increasing every year between the text and the context being discontinuous. If it is handled wisely and wisely through serious and continuous application, especially referring to the values ​​of loyalty, then husband and wife will succeed in improving the quality of their lives in building relationships for the creation of a harmonious family (Hita Graha)). Based on the background above, the writer is interested in raising the title of the research on Faithfulness of Husband and Wife in Manawa Dharmasastra.

<span>Modeling legal text is a difficult task because of its unique features, such as lengthy texts, complex language structures, and technical terms. During the last decade, there has been a big rise in the number of legislative documents, which makes it hard for law professionals to keep up with legislation like analyzing judgements and implementing acts. The relevancy of topics is heavily influenced by the processing and presentation of legal documents in some contexts. The objective of this work is to understand the legal judgement corpus related to cases under the Hindu Marriage Act of India. The study looked into various methods to generate sentence embeddings from the judgement. This paper employs the power of the BERTopic algorithm for generating significant topics.</span>

<p>Abstract<br />This article aims to examine the ratification of changes in legal status and gender replacement procedures in population documents for transsexuals in Indonesia, as well as the legality of marriages for transsexuals in terms of Law Number 1 of 1974 concerning Marriage. The research method used is a type of normative legal research, with a qualitative approach. The legal materials used are primary and secondary legal materials, with data collection techniques used are literature study or document study techniques. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that in Indonesia there are no specific rules regarding sex change, but for judges they cannot refuse a case because the law does not exist or is unclear. Regarding the procedure for changing sexes in population documents regulated in Act Number 23 of 2006 concerning Population Administration and Presidential Regulation of the Republic of Indonesia Number 25 of 2008 concerning Requirements and Procedures for Population Registration and Civil Registration. Then regarding the validity of marriage for transsexuals, from the six religions recognized by the government as the official religion in Indonesia, namely Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, do not legalize a marriage carried out by parties, one of whom is a transsexual who has gone through Sex Reassignment Surgery. <br />Keywords: Sex Reassignment; Transsexual; Legality of Marriage.</p><p>Abstrak<br />Artikel ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji pengesahan perubahan status hukum dan prosedur penggantian jenis kelamin di dokumen kependudukan bagi transeksual di Indonesia, serta keabsahan perkawinan bagi transeksual ditinjau dari Undang-Undang Nomor 1 Tahun 1974 tentang Perkawinan. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah jenis penelitian hukum normatif, dengan pendekatan kualitatif. Bahan hukum yang digunakan adalah bahan hukum primer dan sekunder, dengan teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah teknik studi kepustakaan atau studi dokumen. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, disimpulkan bahwa di Indonesia belum ada aturan khusus mengenai penggantian jenis kelamin, namun bagi hakim tidak boleh menolak suatu perkara karena Undang-Undang tidak ada atau tidak jelas. Mengenai prosedur penggantian jenis kelamin di dokumen kependudukan diatur dalam Undang- Undang Nomor 23 Tahun 2006 tentang Administrasi Kependudukan dan Peraturan Presiden Republik Indonesia Nomor 25 Tahun 2008 tentang Persyaratan dan Tata Cara Pendaftaran Penduduk dan Pencatatan Sipil. Kemudian mengenai keabsahan perkawinan bagi transeksual, dari keenam agama yang diakui pemerintah sebagai agama resmi di Indonesia yaitu Islam, Kristen, Katolik, Hindu, Buddha, dan Khonghucu, tidak mensahkan suatu perkawinan yang dilaksanakan oleh para pihak yang salah satunya seorang transeksual yang telah melalui operasi penggantian kelamin.<br />Kata Kunci: Penggantian Kelamin; Transeksual; Keabsahan Perkawinan.</p>

This study discusses about the value of teaching the loyalty of Devi Savitri in Vana Parwa. This theme was created based on the phenomenon of the declining value of faithfulness between husband and wife in married life, as they appear in the mass media and real life which are affairs and divorce in marriage. Related to that phenomenon, writer invites people began to improve itself by studying Hindu literature. Which one of them is Devi Savitri's story in the Vana Parva, which can be used as guidance in run a married life. This study tried to explore the value of teaching the loyalty of Devi Savitri in Vana Parwa, as well as its still relevance in this era. This research is a literature study. Using the concept the value of teaching the loyalty of Devi Savitri, and Vana Parva. The results of this study found that Devi Savitri was the wife who uphold the Satya concepts, such as Satya Wacana, Satya Hredaya, Satya Laksana, Satya Mitra and Satya Samaya. Furthermore, Devi Savitri also act with love and devotion to her family. In order to the values and the concepts can be applied in this era.

Live-in relationship, that is, living together as couple without being married to each other in a legally accepted way, is considered a taboo in India. But recently, such relationships are being increasingly common due to a variety of reasons. In absence of any specific legislation, rules, or customs on the subject, the Supreme Court has issued certain guidelines in its judgment for regulating such relationships. This article tries to figure out the current legal positions governing the live-in relationships in India after making a systemic assessment of these judgments. Live-in relationship between two consenting adults is not considered illegal and if the couple present themselves to the society as husband and wife and live together for a significant period of time, the relationship is considered to be a relationship “in the nature of marriage” under the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, 2005. Consequently, the female partner is entitled to claim alimony under its provisions. Children born out of such relationships are considered legitimate and entitled to get share in the self-acquired property of their parents, though they are not entitled for a coparcenary share in the Hindu undivided family property. Live-in relationships may enable the couple to know each other better, but such no-strings-attached relationship has its disadvantages as well. The couple faces multiple social and logistics problems in day-to-day living. From mental health point of view, it is considered better to be engaged in a good-quality relationship than living alone and having no relation at all.

Age long custom of Child Marriage could not be challenged in nineteenth century because neither reformer did have shastric evidences nor organized female voice opposed it, except sporadic cases. The main argument of this paper is that the first half of Twentieth century witnessed active participation of organized women of India, which raised their questions themselves and determined the enactment of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1929. Simultaneously, this paper also aims to contradict an idea that towards the end of Nineteenth century women’s question was disappeared from agenda of public debates. I have used Government of India official papers, journals, contemporary books both in Hindi and English.

Discrimination on cultural and ethnic grounds is a crime in Nepal. [Caste Based Discrimination and Untouchability (Offence and Punishment) Act, 2068 (2011) * * There are two different dates which reflect the Bikram Sambat which is the official Hindu calendar in Nepal. This calendar is 57 years ahead of Gregorian calendar. For example, 19 August 2017 AD is 03 Bhadra 2074 Bikram Sambat. Thus, the date 2068 is in Bikram Sambat, 2011 is per Gregorian calendar which is unofficial so kept in parenthesis. This text is available online from: http://www.ilo.org/aids/legislation/WCMS_190732/lang–en/index.htm . ]. However, cases of caste-based discrimination continue and have been reported in the newspapers. They occur because most families refuse to accept inter-caste marriages in Nepal as they fear they will become social outcasts. We present a tragic case where a young couple in their 20s made a pact to end their lives by jumping from Nepal’s highest suspension bridge. Preliminary police investigation suggested their inter-caste relationship was the reason.

Background: Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the main components related with clinical outcomes. At the point when SES is low, clinical consideration is lacking and this has been credited to unfriendly results include anemia and pregnancy-induced hypertension.Methods: The study was conducted in the Department of obstetrics and gynecology and the Department of Community Medicine of a private Hospital, for one year. Data was collected using a questionnaire by interview. Study variables included monthly income (i.e. <Rs. 6000, 6000-12000 and >Rs. 12000) lifestyle, eating habits and type and amount of food consumed, a pattern of health care utilization, chronic illness, history of illicit and employment status of husband and women.Results: In the current study, the majority of 83 (67.4%) participants were between 18 and 19 years of age, with their mean age being 18.1±2.3 years, and 108 (87.8%) were Hindus by religion. As many as 113 (91.8%) teens were housewives and 42 (34.1%) of their husbands were factory workers. Most 59 (47.9%) of the teens belonged to class IV socioeconomic status as per modified BG Prasad classification and 93 (75.6%) were living in a joint family.Conclusions: The mean age of participants was 18.1 years, and that of marriage was 17 years and this occurrence of pregnancy in teenagers leads to adverse outcomes. Thus, periodic information, education and communication activities have to be held, and the child marriage act has to be strictly enforced to improve their health.

This research article titled "Status of Minorities: A Comparative Study of India and Pakistan", is an attempt to understand the status of minorities e.g., economic, political, social and constitutional rights that has been underestimated for decades. Comparative analysis research method has been used to comprehend the rights of minorities and their violations by India and Pakistan. To understand the status of minorities in India and Pakistan the liberalism theory is being used. The data supported my research hypothesis "Violations of Rights of Minorities in Pakistan is the outcome of individual actions whereas in India the violation of minority rights is backed by government machinery" Pakistan's stance on protection of constitutional, socio economic and political rights of minorities from day first is very clear. Rights of minorities have been protected under objective resolution 1949 and then in constitution of 1973. While Indian constitution is a secular one, the majority Hindus are using this secular constitution to exploit rights of the minorities. Off and on the communal violence is been witnessed. Gujrat massacre under the Chief Minister ship of Modi current Prime Minister of India can be termed as state sponsored massacre of Muslims. When Modi took office as PM, the radical Hindus become more hostile towards minorities living in India. On governmental level many unilateral legislations have been made against minorities' religious rituals e.g., Muslim marriage Act of Tripple Talaq. Beside this unlawful Citizenship amendment bill and abrogation of article 370 from Kashmir and Farmers Agricultural Acts without consulting Sikh community led to an uncertainty. The liberalist theory advocates the rights of every individual must be ensured as it is the basic principle of democratic system of government. But it has been observed that serious violations of minority rights at state level in India and individual level in Pakistan.

The entire creation of Bhishma Sahni is an attempt to accept, a understand the presence of darkness and then realize the desire to come out of expections. Partisanship is also the act of shedding light on the life immersed in the deep darkness of his characters. The function of creation is the observance of duty. Sacrifice, and sacrifice have been considered as the test of love. Various dimensions of time, society and culture are found in Sahni's novels. His deep vision has gone on the subject of family relations, all classes, inter-caste marriage, love, and illegal children in society. Sahni's literature became the heart of the masses, the heartbeat of the hearts. He broke the stale traditions settled in illogical systems, and established relevant ideals for the new generation. Abstract in Hindi Language: भीष्म साहनी का सम्पूर्ण सृजन अँधेरों की उपस्थिति को स्वीकारना,समझना और फिर उन अंधेरों से निकलने की आकांक्षा को साकार करने की कोशिश है। भीष्म साहनी आजीवन तमस के पार जाने के रास्ते खोजते रहे। उनके सारे लेखन में गरीब, शोषित, दलित वर्ग की पक्षधरता भी उनके पात्रों के गहन अंधेरों में डूबे जीवन पर प्रकाश डालने का कृत्य है। सृजन का उत्स कर्तव्य पालन ही है। त्याग, बलिदान को प्रेम की कसौटी माना गया है। साहनी के उपन्यासों में समय,समाज और संस्कृति के विभिन्न आयाम मिलते हैं। पारिवारिक सम्बन्ध, सभी वर्ग, समाज में अंतरजातीय विवाह, प्रेम, अवैध संतान विषय पर उनकी गहरी दृष्टि गई है। समग्र वैश्विक साहित्य आस्था और विश्वास के उजाले को साथ लेकर अस्तित्व को सार्थक बनाने का यज्ञ है। साहनी का साहित्य जनमानस का ह्रदयग्राही, दिलों की धड़कन बना। उन्होंने विसंगत व्यवस्थाओं में बसी बासी परम्पराओं को तोड़ा, नई पीढ़ी के लिए प्रासंगिक आदर्श स्थापित किया। Keywords: प्रतिबद्धता, व्यवस्था-विसंगति, कर्तव्य पालन, समाज-संस्कृति, आस्था और विश्वास

Outrageous women, outrageous god. Women in the first two generations of Christianity. By Ross Saunders. Pp. x+182. Alexandria, NSW: E. J. Dwyer, 1996. $10 (paper). 0 85574 278 XMontanism. Gender, authority and the new prophecy. By Christine Trevett. Pp. xiv+299. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. £37.50. 0 521 41182 3God's Englishwomen. Seventeenth-century radical sectarian writing and feminist criticism. By Hilary Hinds. Pp. vii+264. Manchester–New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. £35 (cloth), £14.99 (paper). 0 7190 4886 9; 0 7190 4887 7Women and religion in medieval and Renaissance Italy. Edited by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, translated by Margery J. Schneider. (Women in Culture and Society.) Pp. x+334 incl. 11 figs. Chicago–London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. (first publ. as Mistiche e devote nell'Italia tardomedievale, Liguori Editore, 1992). £39.95 ($50) (cloth), £13.50 ($16.95) (paper). 0 226 06637 1; 0 226 06639 8The virgin and the bride. Idealized womanhood in late antiquity. By Kate Cooper. Pp. xii+180. Cambridge, Mass.–London: Harvard University Press, 1996. £24.95. 0 674 93949 2St Augustine on marriage and sexuality. Edited by Elizabeth A. Clark. (Selections from the Fathers of the Church, 1.) Pp. xi+112. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. £23.95 (cloth), £11.50 (paper). 0 8132 0866 1; 0 8132 0867 XGender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800. By Anthony Fletcher. Pp. xxii+442+40 plates. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1995. £25. 0 300 06531 0Empress and handmaid. On nature and gender in the cult of the Virgin Mary. By Sarah Jane Boss. Pp. x+253+9 plates. London–New York: Cassell, 2000. £45 (cloth), £19.99 (paper). 0 304 33926 1; 0 304 70781 3‘You have stept out of your place’. A history of women and religion in America. By Susan Hill Lindley. Pp. xi+500. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996. $35. 0 664 22081 9The position of women within Christianity might well be described as paradoxical. The range of practices in the early Church with regard to women, leadership and ministry indicates that this was the case from the beginning, and the legacy of conflicting biblical texts about the role of women – Galatians. iii. 28 versus 1 Corinthians xi. 3 and Ephesians v. 22–3 for example – has, perhaps, made that paradoxical position inevitable ever since. It might be argued, then, that the history of Christianity illustrates the working out of that paradox, as women have sought to rediscover or remain true to what they have seen as a strand of radically egalitarian origins for Christianity which has been subsumed by the dominant patriarchal structure and ideology of the Church. The tension of this paradox has been played out when women have struggled to act upon that thread of egalitarianism and yet remain within Churches that have been (and, it could be argued, remain) ‘patriarchally’ structured.

Hindu Marriage Registration Act, 2012 has been made as it is expedient and necessary to enact provision related to hindu marriage registration with the aim of protecting the documentary evidence of classical marriages of hindus. There are some loopholes regarding marriage registration in the Hindu Marriage Registration Act, 2012. It is necessary for Bangladesh to turn these loopholes into proper rules because the people of the hindu community of Bangladesh are constantly facing various problems. For the greater interest of all hindus presenting some laws have mentioned in the recommendations which they will be bound to obey and if they do not obey will be brought under punishment.

In 2017, the Parliament of the Pakistan unanimously passed a long-awaited legislation namely the Hindu Marriage Act, 2017. The legislation on the Hindu marriage was to serve the purpose of providing a legal status to the Hindu marriages. The Act is considered a landmark legislation dealing with the personal law of the Hindu community. Since the present legislation is a recent phenomenon, there exists no scholarly work analyzing the context and content of the Act, 2017.The present study intends to interpret the structure of and the themes lies in the text of the Act while employing primarily a qualitative content analysis methodology. The article gives two-fold explanation of the text of the Act, 2017; firstly, the text of the Act is heavily relied upon the text of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 of India; secondly, it is a manifestation of the post-colonial legal plurality and the Hindu customary laws. It is argued that the one, who wishes to understand the essence of context and content of the Act, needs to have an understanding of both the legal pluralism and the Hindu customary laws. The present study generates a debate on the correlation between the customary law and the state law.

It is famously narrated that Pakistan came into being as a state for the Muslim minority of India. Nevertheless, Pakistan was also the homeland of many other religious natives such as Christian, Sikhs, Hindus, Parsis, Buddhists. Even many Jews lived in Pakistan who were the natives of this land for centuries before the partition of 1947. All of these religions are completely different from each other and also have their rituals, traditions, language, caste system, creed, ethnicity, marriage, and divorce laws. All of Pakistan’s constitutions give minorities equal rights, but when in the 1960s, Pakistan developed its first family laws for Muslims and launched “Nikah Nama”, and made other rules and regulations for the majority of its population but forgot about its minorities. Pakistan’s minorities suffer under Anglo Hindu Laws and The Christian Marriage Act of 1872 until recently. Pakistan introduced The Sindh Hindus Marriage Act 2016, the Hindu Marriage Act of 2017 Passed by the National Assembly of Pakistan, The Punjab Anand Karaj Marriage Act of 2018 for Sikh nationals, and the Christian Marriage and Divorce Act 2019 (still waiting for legislation). This article provides a brief introduction of above mention laws in the context of developments under the rights of religious minorities of the state. For this purpose, qualitative research is being conducted.

This article investigates the legal position of a Hindu wife married in terms of Hindu rites. In general, her marriage is not recognised as a valid marriage because it does not comply with the requirements set out in the Marriage Act 25 of 1961. Although the Durban and Coast Local Division of the High Court recently held that she is a "spouse" in terms of the Intestate Succession Act 81 of 1987, her legal position is far from certain. In Singh v Rampersad 2007 3 SA 445 (D) the court held that a monogamous marriage in terms of Hindu rites is not a valid marriage in terms of South African law. The non-recognition of her marriage has certain consequences, especially when a Hindu wife wants to dissolve her "marriage" or one of the "spouses" dies. In this contribution the differences between a Hindu marriage and a civil marriage are pointed out, including the possible consequences if parties want to conclude a marriage in terms of Hindu rites only.

Hindu women’s marriage reform remained a contentious issue in colonial Andhra. The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, popularly known as the Sarda Act, originally fixed the minimum age of marriage of girls and boys at 14 and 18 years, respectively, and thus restrained child marriages. Conservative sections of Andhra society bitterly opposed the Sarda Act. They declared a dharma yudhdham (holy war defending the Hindu religion) on the social reformers, the Congress nationalists and the British government for trying to intrude into the sacred domain of the Hindu family. As they could not stop the Act from being made, they defeated it by making use of the various loopholes present in it. Conservative men mobilised a section of women who took part in the anti-Sarda campaign and agitation. This article is based on a variety of primary sources, especially the woefully neglected conservative journals such as Abhinava Saraswati and Swadharma Prakashini, which undertook a rigorous campaign against the Sarda Act. Pro-reform women’s monthlies such as the Grihalakshmi and newspapers like the Andhra Patrika and Golakonda Patrika, and progressive women’s writings published in contemporary women’s journals are also used.

On September 20th 1929, the Indian Central Legislative Assembly passed the Sarda Act. The Sarda Act was the result of ongoing discussions in India in the early twentieth century that revolved around the age of consent and the age of marriage. Har Bilas Sarda, a member of the Assembly since 1924, introduced the bill in 1927 as the Child Marriage Restraint Act. In history, this bill is celebrated for improving the living conditions for women in Colonial India by addressing the potentially negative physical and social effects that having sex and giving birth could have on young girls. However, what is not discussed in history is the motivations that Har Bilas Sarda had in introducing the bill. Using primary sources, I would like to argue that the Sarda Act was part of a larger nationalist agenda espoused by a Hindu nationalist group called the Arya Samaj which aimed to restore the legacy of the ancient Hindu civilization. I will conclude by linking the themes in Sarda’s writings with the broader historical context to demonstrate that that Sarda’s motivations for campaigning for a higher age of marriage was tied to a Hindu nationalist agenda.

This paper looks at Vidyasagar’s programme for widow marriage while also discussing his campaign against Kulin Brahmin polygamy, child marriage and prostitution – some of the evils that plagued nineteenth-century Bengali society. Vidyasagar’s diligent effort for the legalisation of widow marriage ultimately paid off in 1856 as the British colonial administrators drafted widow marriage into law. The two tracts that Vidyasagar published in 1856 in favour of widow marriage have been looked into some detail as well as opposition to his programme from none other than Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, arguably the greatest Bengali novelist till date. Statistically speaking, not many widows married under the Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act, making the Act, according to some critics, almost a dead letter. However, whether statistics alone does justice to the long-term impact Vidyasagar’s movement has had on Bengal’s social and intellectual life is also discussed.Philosophy and Progress, Vol#55-56; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2014

Endogamy is an age- old compulsory condition for Brahminic India, as prescribed by Hindu scriptures, to maintain the purity of caste. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar thus advocates inter- caste marriage as the practical panacea to eradicate traditional caste stratification in Indian society. Though exogamy has been legitimised under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, still assimilation of caste through marriage remains a taboo in most part of India even in this twenty first century. Therefore, union outside caste are unlikely to get parental consent and turn to be revolutionary love stories. However, not all such unconventional marriages could exactly exemplify the similar spirit of Ambedkar’s view of exogamy. There remains a possibility underneath that their emotional bonding deteriorates to be an unsound marital relationship in this casteist society, at least in this seemingly caste- neutral state West Bengal. This article employs a deductive, analytical, objective method which assists to trace down those instances from Bengali Dalit writer Manju Bala’s short stories that may enquire if the Dalit girls are happily out- married or not.

This research paper is focused in Deepa Mehta's Film Water to study the plight of Hindu widows. As the tradition of Hindu society, widows are compelled to adopt the widow system. Chuyia, the eight year old protagonist is sent to a Bidhuwa Ashram in Benaras because of her widowhood. The exploitation of child-marriage in the grip of patriarchal culture of widowhood, and the rejection of Chuyia to accept her widowhood is presented in the film. Kalyani, the second young widow in the ashram, revolts against such inhuman culture and decides to get married. She is forced to act as a 'prostitute' in the house of bourgeois. Chuyia is also sexually exploited by bourgeois. As a qualitative research, the researcher analyzed the film from the perspective of Hindu evil traditions. Patriarchies, widow tradition, social stereotypes of Hindu traditions are observed in this paper to analyze the film.

"Till death do us apart" the myth of perpetual bond of cohabitation in a Sacrosanct marriage has been faded with time. The social taboo attached to divorce has been diluted and has been accepted as a remedy rather than a curse. There has been a journey in divorce cases from guilt theory to consent and further to breakdown of marriage. Irretrievable Breakdown of Marriage though received the attention of Law Commission of India[1], Judiciary [2] and attempts have been made by the legislature[3] but could not be substantiated in the Family Jurisprudence of India. This paper attempts to focus upon the judgments of the Supreme Court where the inherent jurisdiction under Article 142 of the Constitution has been invoked for doing complete justice in matrimonial disputes. The author tends to limit the scope of the paper to Hindu Marriage Act, 1955.

India has taken a big step in the year 2005 by amending the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, giving women the equal right of inheritance as their male siblings. However, there remains a loophole where women are still marginalized when it comes to the division of property; the division of matrimonial property after separation. It is observed that divorce leads to women facing several hurdles starting from the legal system to their natal homes; the conditions are not suitable for women to have a good life after divorce due to loopholes in the legal system in India. Due to these issues faced by women, they are forced to stay loyal to their exploitative marriage for the rest of their lives. The introduction of the Marriage Law Amendment Bill of 2010, which eases the laws on divorce, brings further problems for women as they subjected to a rough legal system that upholds social morality over constitutional morality.

Marriage (nikāḥ) in Islamic law (sharia), is a legal and social contract between two individuals. It is an act of Islam and is strongly recommended. In Islam Polygyny is permitted under some conditions, but polyandry is forbidden. Economic growth and mass media revolution brought a drastic change in Kashmiri society especially in the field of marriage and family life. Economic prosperity enables people to consume more goods and services and enjoy better standards of living. The traditional marriage system in modern times is disappearing slowly. In traditional marriage system, one requires the families of the future bride and groom to engage in ritual visits and exchange gifts. In general there are two types: civil marriage and religious marriage, and typically marriages employ a combination of both (religious marriages must often be licensed and recognized by the state, and conversely civil marriages, while not sanctioned under religious law, are nevertheless respected). In Kashmir, marriage are performed in various ways and under various religions such as Muslim, Hindu, Sikhs, Christians, etc. In modern times every family member is considered important and is supposed to play his/her role In this context the present research carried out in Kashmir is designed to study the traditional marriage in Kashmir and approach of Kashmiri youth towards marriage as well as family life. Four hundred unmarried educated youth belonged to the age group of 20- 25 years studying in different academic institutions of Kashmir were selected randomly for the present study. The data was collected by questionnaire cum interview method and the results of the study revealed that majority of the respondents agreed with the statement marriage is essential for human life. Majority of the respondents opined that 20-25 year is the suitable age of marriage. In majority, arranged marriage was preferred by (57.5% male and 63.5% female) respondents, a good percentage of respondents (65.5% male and 57.5% female) were against dowry system and a little percentage of respondents believe that dowry helps in getting good match. Majority of respondents (53.5% male and 41.5% female) gave more importance to career than marriage which results in thousands of youth without marriage above the age of 45 years. The study further revealed that majority of the respondents showed positive approach towards family life, wanted to work more after marriage and majority of respondents had confidence that they could make balance between work and family life after marriage. Majority of the respondents during survey told that adjusting, sacrificing, loving and tolerance are the best qualities to lead a good family life. Finally, balanced diet to manage happy married healthy life and solutions to issue related marital life in traditional as well as in scientific system were discussed. It was suggested that for happy healthy married life one should live a pious life, stop stressing over life, follow health advisory, avoid fast foods, unnecessary fatty diet, deep fried foods. spicy, salty and Junk food.

When a person dies intestate his or her heirs are determined by the provisions of section 1(1) and (2) of the Intestate Succession Act 81 of 1987. Included amongst the heirs is the deceased’s surviving spouse, who either takes the entire estate or shares it with the deceased’s descendants (if any). Historically, the reference to “spouse” in the Act was taken to mean a person to whom the deceased was married in terms of the Marriage Act 25 of 1961. Accordingly, persons who were married to the deceased merely by religious rites and persons with whom the deceased was in a long-term conjugal relationship that was unformalised by marriage were excluded.The advent of constitutional democracy in South Africa resulted in a number of challenges to this status quo through reliance on the equality clause of the Bill of Rights. As a result of these challenges it has now been recognised that the survivor of a Hindu marriage, a monogamous Muslim marriage, and a polygynous Muslim marriage all have the right to inherit on intestacy as a “spouse”. Furthermore, in a groundbreaking decision in Gory v Kolver NO (Starke and others intervening) (2007 (4) SA 97 (CC)) the Constitutional Court recognised that the exclusion of the surviving partner of a gay or lesbian relationship from the right to inherit on intestacy was unconstitutional, and directed that the relevant sections of the Intestate Succession Act be amended by a reading-in of additional words to remedy the unconstitutionality. These words conferred the right to inherit on intestacy on the survivor of a monogamous permanent same-sex partnership in which the partners undertook reciprocal duties of support. At the time of writing no survivor of an unformalised opposite-sex relationship has challenged his or her exclusion from intestate succession. Possibly this reticence has been influenced by the decision in Volks NO v Robinson (2005 (5) BCLR 446 (CC)) (hereinafter “Volks”). In Volks the Constitutional Court held that it is not unconstitutional for the Maintenance of Surviving Spouses Act 27 of 1990 to distinguish between married and unmarried persons by giving the survivor of a marriage a claim for reasonable maintenance against the estate of the deceased spouse but not giving a similar claim to the survivor of a relationship in which the parties did not marry.Paleker has raised the question whether the Gory order “must still be applied in light of the Civil Union Act” but he comes to no firm conclusion, and states tentatively that “if marriage … is a precondition for inheriting, persons in same-sex unions who have not solemnised their relationship after the coming into force of the Civil Union Act … may be precluded from inheriting intestate from each other”. On the other hand De Waal and Schoeman-Malan are clearly of the view that the order in the Gory case still operates and – whilst regarding the current position as “anomalous” – they state that it “will probably continue until the Domestic Partnerships Bill [GN36 in GG 30663 of 2008-1-14] eventually does become law”. This has also been the interpretation accepted by the Master’s office acting on advice from the Senior State Law Advisor. The different treatment accorded same-sex couples by the continued retention of the benefits conferred by Gory has been defended on the grounds of substantive equality, since many practical obstacles still stand in the way of same-sex couples formalising their relationships.The question of the continued applicability of the reading-in order in Gory has now come before the Constitutional Court in Laubscher NO v Duplan (2017 (2) SA 264 (CC)) and it is this case which is the focus of this note.

AbstractThis introduction aims at placing the unfolding sub-patterns of the Asian “Second Demographic Transition” (SDT) in a global context by contrasting them with those of societies with other than patriarchal histories. Firstly, fertility transitions to below-replacement level can be achieved as part of the first “altruistic” transition without any SDT traits being present. Secondly, Asian societies are by no means immune to genuine SDT developments, as illustrated by the emergence and spread of pre-marital cohabitation. Thirdly, the SDT cohabitation pattern is still conservative: it is followed by marriage, pregnancies result in shotgun marriages or abortions, and parenthood within consensual unions remains rare. Also divorce rates are low. But it is also argued that all Asian cases are still at the beginning of the possible SDT evolution or have barely started it, and that old ways can die off rather quickly with the succession of generations. Finally, it is shown that the cultural component, i.e. the “Willingness” condition, can act as a bottleneck slowing down the transition to a new pattern of behaviour. We therefore illustrate on a global scale how the spread of cohabitation is part of a broader ethical revolution stressing individual rather than societal discretion in matters of life and death. On the basis of these profiles we expect stronger resistance to SDT patterns of partnerhip formation in Hindu and Muslim societies.

The humanistic approach to society and personal morality is at the foundation of the benevolent maintenance jurisprudence. The word "maintain" comes from the French word "maintenir," and in Latin, "main" is the same as "manus," which means "hand," and "tenir," which is the same as "tenco," which means "to hold," or to lend a hand to someone who needs it. Food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention are all included in the definition of maintenance. It refers to the provision of necessities for existence; a source of support. In terms of marriage law, maintenance refers to the arrangements for necessities and comforts of life, such as clothing, housing, food, education, and medical care. It is the term used to refer to the weekly or monthly payments that may be mandated by a divorce or nullity decree in order to provide for the spouse's maintenance and support during the course of the couple's joint existence. Similar provisions for the benefit of the kids, such as maintenance, may be made in divorce, nullity, judicial separation, or restitution of conjugal rights proceedings. 2 The Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956, defines "maintenance" as follows: "Maintenance" includes I in all circumstances, provisions for food, clothing, housing, education, and medical attendance and treatment; (ii) in the case of an unmarried daughter, also the reasonable costs of, and incident to, her marriage. The maintenance of many parties is provided for by our Indian laws. This personal duty to pay maintenance results from the parties' relationship. The wife, children, and elderly parents are among the parties who are entitled to support. The wife's claim to maintenance is a byproduct of her marital status. The wife has the right to be supported by her husband for the rest of her life under this private responsibility that results from the institution of marriage.

The present study is about inhuman crimes which has its origin from dowry. It enables a detailed discussion on the timely interference of a judiciary which was considered as a new dimension in developing women's rights against exploitation in the name of dowry. The objective of this paper was to study about the aftermath ill effects on the victims of dowry offences and continued significance of such draconian practice even in modern era. The word dowry is almost synonyms with indian women. Dowry is considered as a sacramental and indispensable custom of marriage especially in Hindu religion which turned into an illegal practices of the society due to its inhuman nature.According to manu shastra ,women were regarded as lower class of people which denotes that they were undeclared slaves of such patriarchal society and such society never let women for observance of equality in marital relationship. In addition to that women's dignity is oppressed and questioned by such draconian practices like dowry. Shortcut of dowry indicating low status for women. Ineffective implementation of stringent laws which curbs death deaths indicates the deficiency of government machineries in protecting women’s life. It also makes an attempt to investigate the legal instruments which related to the prohibition of dowry in India. The information acquired from this study show that Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 took its significance and authority from section 498-A and section 304-B which was enumerated in Indian penal code, but Article 51-A of the constitution remains ineffective because such provisions were never considered as an enforceable before a court of law as it was lies in directive principles of state policy which will not bind any government machineries and it was merely a discretionary provision .In recent trends, education is considered as a tool for increasing their bargaining power in dowry negotiations instead of providing social awareness.Judiciary should ensure effective government machinery to implement the stringent laws along with the legal punishment, to do away with this evil practice. the purpose of this study random sampling method has been used There are a total of 1489 samples collected with regard to this study .

Deepa Mehta first attempted to shoot her film Water in the year 2000, in Varanasi, a holy city hanging on the edge of the Ganges in East-Central India. A film about the anguish of widows in 1930’s India, where widowhood was in many parts of the country taken to be a curse, an affliction that the widow paid penance for by living in renunciation of laughter and pleasure, Water points not only to the suffering of widows in colonial India but to the widow-house that still exists in Varanasi and houses poor widows in seclusion and disgrace, away from the community. The film opens the lens to the prostitution and privation experienced by many widows, as well as Gandhi’s efforts to change the laws that affected “widow remarriage.” The international filming crew was forced to shut down production after one day of shooting, following a violent uproar in the Varanasi community. These riots were fueled by the same political party coalition that was responsible for the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, a Muslim religious site dating from the sixteenth-century, that was smashed to rubble when Hindu Nationalists alleged that it was the original site of a Rama temple and hence a Hindu, rather than a Muslim, site of worship. While the Water crew had permission (after a few censorship negotiations) from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to shoot the film in Varanasi, following the riots lead by these fundamentalist political parties—the BJP, the KSRSS and the VHU—the Indian government (lead by the BJP) strode in to shut down, or at the very least delay (which given the tight budget of the film amounted to the same thing), the shooting of this film. It apparently caused too much local upheaval. A few years later, Mehta managed to surreptitiously shoot this last film of the controversial trilogy in Sri Lanka, fielding and ignoring letters from the Indian government that implied that the content of the film was not very flattering to India and showed India in a poor light to the international community. The film was released worldwide in 2005. I would like to place this astringent argument that was put forward by government officials and political rioters in a historical light by locating it within anti-colonial nationalist discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This desire to mask the face of Indian oppressive patriarchy and assert moral uprightness and the ‘reform’ of women is neither new nor original, and dates back to colonial India. The British colonial government had a tendency to zero-in on instances of female oppression by Indian men to justify the fact of colonial power and domination. British rulers denounced the moral degradation and lack of initiative of Indian men as two of the reasons to continue their control of the land in face of the mounting opposition, both in India and in other parts of the world, which was rising up against colonialism and later fascism. Chatterjee analyses this facet of the nationalist movement and suggests that female emancipation was a question of importance at the turn of the century in colonial India, as Indian men defended their right to ‘protect’ their women from oppressive orthodox practices. They repeatedly asserted their ability to rule their own country, and adopt modernity, both through ‘reform’ movements and rebellious uprising. Spivak too addresses this question as it centres on the Sati debate. The immolation of widows on the funereal pyres of husbands is often cited as an example of abusive Indian patriarchy. However, even at its height in the nineteenth century, as both Spivak and Narayan point out, this custom was practiced only in one location in India, and not nationwide as is popularly believed in the West. Debates around widow immolation were an easy answer both for the British to assert moral superiority and for Indian men to claim that they would ‘reform’ the lot of their women, and carve a new, more enlightened nation. The question of ‘widow remarriage’, along with dowry and Sati, became popular issues at various times in the last hundred years when the nation wished to champion the uprightness of Indian masculine morality, and its ability to protect its women. This fretfulness by the government and other political parties over the picture of Indian women that is revealed in Water is an anxiety over the portrayal of India as backward and unenlightened, a plodding place seeped in orthodox traditions and bubbling with religious fundamentalism. It a picture that puts the West at ease in the face of the growth of economic and telecommunications power in the region, and a Western-media-driven picture that often collects self-fulfilling data, while ignoring contradictory evidence. It also points an easy finger that quells and controls the frightening Other. It is really interesting, however, that the very political parties in India who are most active in generating this criticism of the film are in fact the most strongly fundamentalist of all, and are, in a seeming contradiction, also the coalition responsible for speeding open-door economic policies along their way in the second half of the nineties in India. While the nationalist Hindutva coalition quivers at this, one could say “Orientalist” description of Indian women in Water as always-oppressed, always-victims of Indian male chauvinism, it is also this coalition that assisted economic liberalisation policies by indigenising and Orientalising Western products so that they could find an easier market within the Indian population. It seems in fact that the versions of the Indian past that can be made public with lavish additions of Orientalist signs are the ones that are marketable, like yoga, cheap booze, and tantric sex. Add to these the very exportable Indian textiles and jewelry, Indian software engineers and Indian masala films, and you have a sizzling avenue for foreign trade and investment. The versions of the Indian past that are not marketable, however, even if depicted with courage and sensitivity, like the issue of middle-class patriarchal abuse of women and lesbian relationships in Mehta’s Fire (1996), or widow-houses in Water, do not advertise a mecca for tourists or investors, and hence are beaten into oblivion by Hindu fundamentalists. While these fundamentalists wish to change the names of cities from British colonial names to ‘authentic’ Indian ones, or protest against the hosting of the Miss World pageant in India in 1995, they do, however, wish to bring in increasing amounts of foreign investment in the media, in consumer products, and in the service sector to bring new lifestyles and ideologies to the rapidly growing middle-class. While films about widows are inappropriate and apparently show India in a poor light, films about prostitutes (like Devdas released in 2002), as long as they romanticize the courtesan and act as a lure to tourists and diasporic Indians nostalgic for an ‘authentic’ Indian spiritual experience, are entirely acceptable. For fundamentalist political parties that wish to maintain or regain power it seems like an easy step to incite local populations to rise against religious minorities, homosexuals, and filmmakers who wish to document instances of abuse, so that Western imperialism can quietly slide in through the back door. Water points to the inequality between men and women, remarking on the traditional practice of an arranged match between a man in his forties or fifties with a young pre-pubescent girl. It looks closely at the custom of sending widows to live in isolation, lifelong chastity, and renunciation of ‘worldly desires’, while as little nine year old widowed Chuiya in the film points out, there is no such house for widowers. It also, however, talks about the change in laws in the late 1930’s that allowed widows to marry again after the death of their husband, and banned child marriage. It sets the film in the historic struggle of a nation trying to find its feet between Hindu nationalist traditions and British colonial ideologies, Indian aspirations for education and emancipation, and fear of cultural annihilation. Maybe if Mehta romanticized the widows’ struggle, and added a few more song and dance sequences, made the film more marketable and set it in exotic Goa, and allowed the widows to frolic in the streets decked in Indian block prints and marketable kundan jewels, fundamentalist Hindus would not find it quite as disturbing. References Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Chatterjee, Partha. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Corbridge, Stuart, and John Harriss. Reinventing India. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Levy, Emanuel. “Mehta Water”. May 2006 http://www.emanuellevy.com/article.php?articleID=2300>. Mazzarella, William. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Meduri, Avanti. Woman, Nation, Representation. Dissertation. 1996 Narayan, Uma. “Contesting Cultures.” In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Revised ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Carl Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Yuen-Carrucan, Jasmine. “The Politics of Deepa Mehta’s Water” April 2000. May 2006 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/28/water.html>. Films Devdas. Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Nayyar, Mishra and Shah. 2002. Fire. Directed and Produced by Deepa Mehta. 1996. Water. Directed by Deepa Mehta. David Hamilton. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Nijhawan, Amita. "Damning the Flow: Deepa Mehta’s Water." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/3-nijhawan.php>. APA Style Nijhawan, A. (Sep. 2006) "Damning the Flow: Deepa Mehta’s Water," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/3-nijhawan.php>.

The release in 2004 of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice marked yet another contribution to celluloid’s Austen mania that began in the 1990s and is still going strong. Released almost simultaneously on three different continents (in the UK, US, and India), and in two different languages (English and Hindi), Bride and Prejudice, however, is definitely not another Anglo-American period costume drama. Described by one reviewer as “East meets West”, Chadha’s film “marries a characteristically English saga [Austen’s Pride and Prejudice] with classic Bollywood format “transforming corsets to saris, … the Bennetts to the Bakshis and … pianos to bhangra beats” (Adarsh). Bride and Prejudice, thus, clearly belongs to the upcoming genre of South Asian cross-over cinema in its diasporic incarnation. Such cross-over cinema self-consciously acts as a bridge between at least two distinct cinematic traditions—Hollywood and Bollywood (Indian Hindi cinema). By taking Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as her source text, Chadha has added another dimension to the intertextuality of such cross-over cinema, creating a complex hybrid that does not fit neatly into binary hyphenated categories such as “Asian-American cinema” that film critics such as Mandal invoke to characterise diaspora productions. An embodiment of contemporary globalised (post?)coloniality in its narrative scope, embracing not just Amritsar and LA, but also Goa and London, Bride and Prejudice refuses to fit into a neat East versus West cross-cultural model. How, then, are we to classify this film? Is this problem of identity indicative of postmodern indeterminacy of meaning or can the film be seen to occupy a “third” space, to act as a postcolonial hybrid that successfully undermines (neo)colonial hegemony (Sangari, 1-2)? To answer this question, I will examine Bride and Prejudice as a mimic text, focusing specifically on its complex relationship with Bollywood conventions. According to Gurinder Chadha, Bride and Prejudice is a “complete Hindi movie” in which she has paid “homage to Hindi cinema” through “deliberate references to the cinema of Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar” (Jha). This list of film makers is associated with a specific Bollywood sub-genre: the patriotic family romance. Combining aspects of two popular Bollywood genres, the “social” (Prasad, 83) and the “romance” (Virdi, 178), this sub-genre enacts the story of young lovers caught within complex familial politics against the backdrop of a nationalist celebration of Indian identity. Using a cinematic language that is characterised by the spectacular in both its aural and visual aspects, the patriotic family romance follows a typical “masala” narrative pattern that brings together “a little action and some romance with a touch of comedy, drama, tragedy, music, and dance” (Jaikumar). Bride and Prejudice’s successful mimicry of this language and narrative pattern is evident in film reviews consistently pointing to its being very “Bollywoodish”: “the songs and some sequences look straight out of a Hindi film” says one reviewer (Adarsh), while another wonders “why this talented director has reduced Jane Austen’s creation to a Bollywood masala film” (Bhaskaran). Setting aside, for the moment, these reviewers’ condemnation of such Bollywood associations, it is worthwhile to explore the implications of yoking together a canonical British text with Indian popular culture. According to Chadha, this combination is made possible since “the themes of Jane Austen’s novels are a ‘perfect fit’ for a Bollywood style film” (Wray). Ostensibly, such a comment may be seen to reinforce the authority of the colonial canonical text by affirming its transnational/transhistorical relevance. From this perspective, the Bollywood adaptation not only becomes a “native” tribute to the colonial “master” text, but also, implicitly, marks the necessary belatedness of Bollywood as a “native” cultural formation that can only mimic the “English book”. Again, Chadha herself seems to subscribe to this view: “I chose Pride and Prejudice because I feel 200 years ago, England was no different than Amritsar today” (Jha). The ease with which the basic plot premise of Pride and Prejudice—a mother with grown-up daughters obsessed with their marriage—transfers to a contemporary Indian setting does seem to substantiate this idea of belatedness. The spatio-temporal contours of the narrative require changes to accommodate the transference from eighteenth-century English countryside to twenty-first-century India, but in terms of themes, character types, and even plot elements, Bride and Prejudice is able to “mimic” its master text faithfully. While the Bennets, Bingleys and Darcy negotiate the relationship between marriage, money and social status in an England transformed by the rise of industrial capitalism, the Bakshis, Balraj and, yes, Will Darcy, undertake the same tasks in an India transformed by corporate globalisation. Differences in class are here overlaid with those in culture as a middle-class Indian family interacts with wealthy non-resident British Indians and American owners of multinational enterprises, mingling the problems created by pride in social status with prejudices rooted in cultural insularity. However, the underlying conflicts between social and individual identity, between relationships based on material expediency and romantic love, remain the same, clearly indicating India’s belated transition from tradition to modernity. It is not surprising, then, that Chadha can claim that “the transposition [of Austen to India] did not offend the purists in England at all” (Jha). But if the purity of the “master” text is not contaminated by such native mimicry, then how does one explain the Indian anglophile rejection of Bride and Prejudice? The problem, according to the Indian reviewers, lies not in the idea of an Indian adaptation, but in the choice of genre, in the devaluation of the “master” text’s cultural currency by associating it with the populist “masala” formula of Bollywood. The patriotic family romance, characterised by spectacular melodrama with little heed paid to psychological complexity, is certainly a far cry from the restrained Austenian narrative that achieves its dramatic effect exclusively through verbal sparring and epistolary revelations. When Elizabeth and Darcy’s quiet walk through Pemberley becomes Lalita and Darcy singing and dancing through public fountains, and the private economic transaction that rescues Lydia from infamy is translated into fisticuff between Darcy and Wickham in front of an applauding cinema audience, mimicry does smack too much of mockery to be taken as a tribute. It is no wonder then that “the news that [Chadha] was making Bride and Prejudice was welcomed with broad grins by everyone [in Britain] because it’s such a cheeky thing to do” (Jha). This cheekiness is evident throughout the film, which provides a splendid over-the-top cinematic translation of Pride and Prejudice that deliberately undermines the seriousness accorded to the Austen text, not just by the literary establishment, but also by cinematic counterparts that attempt to preserve its cultural value through carefully constructed period pieces. Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, on the other hand, marries British high culture to Indian popular culture, creating a mimic text that is, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “almost the same, but not quite” (86), thus undermining the authority, the primacy, of the so-called “master” text. This postcolonial subversion is enacted in Chadha’s film at the level of both style and content. If the adaptation of fiction into film is seen as an activity of translation, of a semiotic shift from one language to another (Boyum, 21), then Bride and Prejudice can be seen to enact this translation at two levels: the obvious translation of the language of novel into the language of film, and the more complex translation of Western high culture idiom into the idiom of Indian popular culture. The very choice of target language in the latter case clearly indicates that “authenticity” is not the intended goal here. Instead of attempting to render the target language transparent, making it a non-intrusive medium that derives all its meaning from the source text, Bride and Prejudice foregrounds the conventions of Bollywood masala films, forcing its audience to grapple with this “new” language on its own terms. The film thus becomes a classic instance of the colony “talking back” to the metropolis, of Caliban speaking to Prospero, not in the language Prospero has taught him, but in his own native tongue. The burden of responsibility is shifted; it is Prospero/audiences in the West that have the responsibility to understand the language of Bollywood without dismissing it as gibberish or attempting to domesticate it, to reduce it to the familiar. The presence in Bride and Prejudice of song and dance sequences, for example, does not make it a Hollywood musical, just as the focus on couples in love does not make it a Hollywood-style romantic comedy. Neither The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) nor You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998) corresponds to the Bollywood patriotic family romance that combines various elements from distinct Hollywood genres into one coherent narrative pattern. Instead, it is Bollywood hits like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Pardes (Subhash Ghai, 1997) that constitute the cinema tradition to which Bride and Prejudice belongs, and against which backdrop it needs to be seen. This is made clear in the film itself where the climactic fight between Darcy and Wickham is shot against a screening of Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (East and West) (1970), establishing Darcy, unequivocally, as the Bollywood hero, the rescuer of the damsel in distress, who deserves, and gets, the audience’s full support, denoted by enthusiastic applause. Through such intertextuality, Bride and Prejudice enacts a postcolonial reversal whereby the usual hierarchy governing the relationship between the colony and the metropolis is inverted. By privileging through style and explicit reference the Indian Bollywood framework in Bride and Prejudice, Chadha implicitly minimises the importance of Austen’s text, reducing it to just one among several intertextual invocations without any claim to primacy. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to view Bride and Prejudice without any knowledge of Austen; its characters and narrative pattern are fully comprehensible within a well-established Bollywood tradition that is certainly more familiar to a larger number of Indians than is Austen. An Indian audience, thus, enjoys a home court advantage with this film, not the least of which is the presence of Aishwarya Rai, the Bollywood superstar who is undoubtedly the central focus of Chadha’s film. But star power apart, the film consolidates the Indian advantage through careful re-visioning of specific plot elements of Austen’s text in ways that clearly reverse the colonial power dynamics between Britain and India. The re-casting of Bingley as the British Indian Balraj re-presents Britain in terms of its immigrant identity. White British identity, on the other hand, is reduced to a single character—Johnny Wickham—which associates it with a callous duplicity and devious exploitation that provide the only instance in this film of Bollywood-style villainy. This re-visioning of British identity is evident even at the level of the film’s visuals where England is identified first by a panning shot that covers everything from Big Ben to a mosque, and later by a snapshot of Buckingham Palace through a window: a combination of its present multicultural reality juxtaposed against its continued self-representation in terms of an imperial tradition embodied by the monarchy. This reductionist re-visioning of white Britain’s imperial identity is foregrounded in the film by the re-casting of Darcy as an American entrepreneur, which effectively shifts the narratorial focus from Britain to the US. Clearly, with respect to India, it is now the US which is the imperial power, with London being nothing more than a stop-over on the way from Amritsar to LA. This shift, however, does not in itself challenge the more fundamental West-East power hierarchy; it merely indicates a shift of the imperial centre without any perceptible change in the contours of colonial discourse. The continuing operation of the latter is evident in the American Darcy’s stereotypical and dismissive attitude towards Indian culture as he makes snide comments about arranged marriages and describes Bhangra as an “easy dance” that looks like “screwing in a light bulb with one hand and patting a dog with the other.” Within the film, this cultural snobbery of the West is effectively challenged by Lalita, the Indian Elizabeth, whose “liveliness of mind” is exhibited here chiefly through her cutting comebacks to such disparaging remarks, making her the film’s chief spokesperson for India. When Darcy’s mother, for example, dismisses the need to go to India since yoga and Deepak Chopra are now available in the US, Lalita asks her if going to Italy has become redundant because Pizza Hut has opened around the corner? Similarly, she undermines Darcy’s stereotyping of India as the backward Other where arranged marriages are still the norm, by pointing out the eerie similarity between so-called arranged marriages in India and the attempts of Darcy’s own mother to find a wife for him. Lalita’s strategy, thus, is not to invert the hierarchy by proving the superiority of the East over the West; instead, she blurs the distinction between the two, while simultaneously introducing the West (as represented by Darcy and his mother) to the “real India”. The latter is achieved not only through direct conversational confrontations with Darcy, but also indirectly through her own behaviour and deportment. Through her easy camaraderie with local Goan kids, whom she joins in an impromptu game of cricket, and her free-spirited guitar-playing with a group of backpacking tourists, Lalita clearly shows Darcy (and the audience in the West) that so-called “Hicksville, India” is no different from the so-called cosmopolitan sophistication of LA. Lalita is definitely not the stereotypical shy retiring Indian woman; this jean-clad, tractor-riding gal is as comfortable dancing the garbha at an Indian wedding as she is sipping marguerites in an LA restaurant. Interestingly, this East-West union in Aishwarya Rai’s portrayal of Lalita as a modern Indian woman de-stabilises the stereotypes generated not only by colonial discourse but also by Bollywood’s brand of conservative nationalism. As Chadha astutely points out, “Bride and Prejudice is not a Hindi film in the true sense. That rikshawallah in the front row in Patna is going to say, ‘Yeh kya hua? Aishwarya ko kya kiya?’ [What did you do to Aishwarya?]” (Jha). This disgruntlement of the average Indian Hindi-film audience, which resulted in the film being a commercial flop in India, is a result of Chadha’s departures from the conventions of her chosen Bollywood genre at both the cinematic and the thematic levels. The perceived problem with Aishwarya Rai, as articulated by the plaintive question of the imagined Indian viewer, is precisely her presentation as a modern (read Westernised) Indian heroine, which is pretty much an oxymoron within Bollywood conventions. In all her mainstream Hindi films, Aishwarya Rai has conformed to these conventions, playing the demure, sari-clad, conventional Indian heroine who is untouched by any “anti-national” western influence in dress, behaviour or ideas (Gangoli,158). Her transformation in Chadha’s film challenges this conventional notion of a “pure” Indian identity that informs the Bollywood “masala” film. Such re-visioning of Bollywood’s thematic conventions is paralleled, in Bride and Prejudice, with a playfully subversive mimicry of its cinematic conventions. This is most obvious in the song-and-dance sequences in the film. While their inclusion places the film within the Bollywood tradition, their actual picturisation creates an audio-visual pastiche that freely mingles Bollywood conventions with those of Hollywood musicals as well as contemporary music videos from both sides of the globe. A song, for example, that begins conventionally enough (in Bollywood terms) with three friends singing about one of them getting married and moving away, soon transforms into a parody of Hollywood musicals as random individuals from the marketplace join in, not just as chorus, but as developers of the main theme, almost reducing the three friends to a chorus. And while the camera alternates between mid and long shots in conventional Bollywood fashion, the frame violates the conventions of stylised choreography by including a chaotic spill-over that self-consciously creates a postmodern montage very different from the controlled spectacle created by conventional Bollywood song sequences. Bride and Prejudice, thus, has an “almost the same, but not quite” relationship not just with Austen’s text but also with Bollywood. Such dual-edged mimicry, which foregrounds Chadha’s “outsider” status with respect to both traditions, eschews all notions of “authenticity” and thus seems to become a perfect embodiment of postcolonial hybridity. Does this mean that postmodern pastiche can fulfill the political agenda of postcolonial resistance to the forces of globalised (neo)imperialism? As discussed above, Bride and Prejudice does provide a postcolonial critique of (neo)colonial discourse through the character of Lalita, while at the same time escaping the trap of Bollywood’s explicitly articulated brand of nationalism by foregrounding Lalita’s (Westernised) modernity. And yet, ironically, the film unselfconsciously remains faithful to contemporary Bollywood’s implicit ideological framework. As most analyses of Bollywood blockbusters in the post-liberalisation (post-1990) era have pointed out, the contemporary patriotic family romance is distinct from its earlier counterparts in its unquestioning embrace of neo-conservative consumerist ideology (Deshpande, 187; Virdi, 203). This enthusiastic celebration of globalisation in its most recent neo-imperial avatar is, interestingly, not seen to conflict with Bollywood’s explicit nationalist agenda; the two are reconciled through a discourse of cultural nationalism that happily co-exists with a globalisation-sponsored rampant consumerism, while studiously ignoring the latter’s neo-colonial implications. Bride and Prejudice, while self-consciously redefining certain elements of this cultural nationalism and, in the process, providing a token recognition of neo-imperial configurations, does not fundamentally question this implicit neo-conservative consumerism of the Bollywood patriotic family romance. This is most obvious in the film’s gender politics where it blindly mimics Bollywood conventions in embodying the nation as a woman (Lalita) who, however independent she may appear, not only requires male protection (Darcy is needed to physically rescue Lakhi from Wickham) but also remains an object of exchange between competing systems of capitalist patriarchy (Uberoi, 207). At the film’s climax, Lalita walks away from her family towards Darcy. But before Darcy embraces the very willing Lalita, his eyes seek out and receive permission from Mr Bakshi. Patriarchal authority is thus granted due recognition, and Lalita’s seemingly bold “independent” decision remains caught within the politics of patriarchal exchange. This particular configuration of gender politics is very much a part of Bollywood’s neo-conservative consumerist ideology wherein the Indian woman/nation is given enough agency to make choices, to act as a “voluntary” consumer, within a globalised marketplace that is, however, controlled by the interests of capitalist patriarchy. The narrative of Bride and Prejudice perfectly aligns this framework with Lalita’s project of cultural nationalism, which functions purely at the personal/familial level, but which is framed at both ends of the film by a visual conjoining of marriage and the marketplace, both of which are ultimately outside Lalita’s control. Chadha’s attempt to appropriate and transform British “Pride” through subversive postcolonial mimicry, thus, ultimately results only in replacing it with an Indian “Bride,” with a “star” product (Aishwarya Rai / Bride and Prejudice / India as Bollywood) in a splendid package, ready for exchange and consumption within the global marketplace. All glittering surface and little substance, Bride and Prejudice proves, once again, that postmodern pastiche cannot automatically double as politically enabling postcolonial hybridity (Sangari, 23-4). References Adarsh, Taran. “Balle Balle! From Amritsar to L.A.” IndiaFM Movie Review 8 Oct. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://indiafm.com/movies/review/7211/index.html>. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 1999. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York, 1994. 85-92. Bhaskaran, Gautam. “Classic Made Trivial.” The Hindu 15 Oct. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/fr/2004/10/15/stories/ 2004101502220100.htm>. Boyum, Joy Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989. Bride and Prejudice. Dir. Gurinder Chadha. Perf. Aishwarya Ray and Martin Henderson. Miramax, 2004. Deshpande, Sudhanva. “The Consumable Hero of Globalized India.” Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. 186-203. Gangoli, Geetanjali. “Sexuality, Sensuality and Belonging: Representations of the ‘Anglo-Indian’ and the ‘Western’ Woman in Hindi Cinema.” Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. 143-162. Jaikumar, Priya. “Bollywood Spectaculars.” World Literature Today 77.3/4 (2003): n. pag. Jha, Subhash K. “Bride and Prejudice is not a K3G.” The Rediff Interview 30 Aug. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://in.rediff.com/movies/2004/aug/30finter.htm>. Mandal, Somdatta. Film and Fiction: Word into Image. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2005. Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. Sangari, Kumkum. Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika, 1999. Uberoi, Patricia. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2006. Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Wray, James. “Gurinder Chadha Talks Bride and Prejudice.” Movie News 7 Feb. 2005. 19 Feb. http://movies.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_4163.php/ Gurinder_Chadha_Talks_Bride_and_Prejudice>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mathur, Suchitra. "From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>. APA Style Mathur, S. (May 2007) "From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>.

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. 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