Is patriarchy a key to understanding different forms of inequalities in Indian society? Elaborate. (2024)
Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) lifted patriarchy out of the dictionary, where it meant rule of the father over a household, and made it a political category: a relation of power between the sexes operating inside private life as much as in public institutions. The question asks whether that category is a key to Indian inequality. It is — but an intersecting key, not a master key.
Why the concept can travel beyond gender
Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) explains its reach: patriarchy is not one relation but six interlocking sites — household production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and culture. A system distributed across that many sites necessarily cuts through caste, class, region and religion rather than sitting beside them.
Where the key turns fully: caste
Uma Chakravarti’s “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India” (EPW, 1993) is the strongest case. Caste is reproduced by endogamy; endogamy requires certainty about whom women bear children to; so the upper-caste woman’s sexuality becomes a matter of ritual order, not private morality. Caste inequality and gender inequality are then one mechanism, not two. The corollary is visible now in honour killings, khap intervention against same-gotra and inter-caste marriage, and the policing of mobility — and Prem Chowdhry’s Haryana work shows this intensifies where land and marriage markets are under strain.
Where a second key is needed
- Sharmila Rege (Writing Caste, Writing Gender) argues Indian feminism universalised the upper-caste woman’s experience, and proposes a Dalit feminist standpoint: Dalit women meet caste, class and gender simultaneously, which an undifferentiated “patriarchy” flattens. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality (1989) names the same defect.
- Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) adds the class axis: effective rights in arable land, not gender attitudes alone, determine rural women’s bargaining power.
Testing the claim against evidence
- Agriculture Census 2015-16 records women as 13.96 per cent of operational holders and 11.72 per cent of operated area — a gender gap nested inside an already class-stratified structure.
- Female labour force participation (15 and above) rose from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24 (PLFS), yet much of the rise is unpaid helper work on family farms: patriarchy adapting, not retreating.
- NFHS-5 (2019-21) recorded a sex ratio at birth of 929, with the worst ratios in the prosperous north-west — which defeats any simple poverty explanation and points back to kinship and property.
Conclusion
Patriarchy is indispensable but not self-sufficient. Used generically it explains nothing in particular; specified as caste-patriarchy, class-patriarchy and community-patriarchy, it becomes the key that actually turns. Chakravarti’s warning stands: a gender answer in India with no endogamy in it has missed the mechanism.