23 – Unfamiliar: Family, Law, and Democracy in South Asia

October 4, 2025
8:30 am
H03
This panel examines the intersections of family and democracy through the lens of law in postcolonial South Asia. We are interested in how the debates around religion and law which have remained largely tied to the issue of uniform civil code in India can be expanded and discussed in comparison with personal law debates in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and in the context of a global transformation and redefinition of the family, (non-)marital, and parent-child relations. The panel explores the larger terrain of family law including marriage, divorce, child custody, shared parenting, maintenance and inheritance. We want to examine the history of legal change alongside processes of democratization and authoritarianism in South Asia. The panel hopes to create new conversations between historians of family, law and democracy in South Asia to develop a comparative model of analysis of processes of democratisation and de-democratisation of the family in modern South Asia. We invite papers from the field of Women’s and LGBTQ Studies and legal history in particular to understand the structures, mechanisms and actors involved in processes of legal change. To explore the wider social history of law making and change, we are interested in papers looking at a wide range of actors, including lawmakers in parliament, litigants, lawyers, and judges in courts, as well as religious associations, caste organisations, women’s, LGBTQ and children’s rights groups, and other civil society organisations. The panel seeks to initiate new research conversations around personal law, live-in partners, same-sex couples, single parents, and co-parenting discourse and legislation in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in the context of the global transformation of the family.

Convenors

Dr. Razak Khan
Dr. Jana Tschurenev

Presentations

Law, Islamic Law, and the Tyabji Clan: Muslim Family and Legal Culture in Colonial Bombay
Rahman Raisur - -
Hindu Succession Act, secular politics, and framing the female subject
Nagar Ila - The Ohio State University, The Ohio State University, Columbus, United States
Laws within limits: child marriage, religion and the state in Pakistan
Jones Justin - Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Imagining Family: Childhood in Urdu Children’s Magazines in South Asia
Alam Asiya - Louisiana State University, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, United States