Define patriarchy. Does it have bearings on women’s entitlement in Indian family system? Explain. (2019)
In the Indian family, patriarchy is most precisely defined through kinship rather than attitude: a system in which descent, residence and authority all run through men — patriliny, patrilocality and patripotestality — so that a woman belongs fully to neither the natal nor the conjugal household. Leela Dube showed this is constitutive, not incidental: the girl is raised as paraya dhan, a transient member of the house she is born into. Entitlement in such a system is structurally conditional — patriarchy does not merely influence women’s entitlements, it defines their form.
What “entitlement” means technically
Amartya Sen used entitlement to mean what a person can actually command, not the rights she formally holds. His cooperative conflict model (1990) applies it to the household: members cooperate because all gain from staying together, but the gains divide many ways, and the division turns on the breakdown position (how badly off she is if cooperation ends), the perceived interest response (whether she treats her own welfare as a legitimate claim) and the perceived contribution response (whether her contribution is seen to count). Indian women lose on all three, which is why formal equality and actual command diverge.
Property: the right that is granted and surrendered
The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 gave daughters absolute ownership but left the Mitakshara coparcenary male. The 2005 Amendment made daughters coparceners by birth, and Vineeta Sharma v Rakesh Sharma (2020) settled that the right accrues by birth irrespective of when the father died. Yet Bina Agarwal (A Field of One’s Own, 1994) insists on the word effective: land registered to a woman but cultivated by her brother and managed by her husband changes little. NFHS-5 (2019-21) found only 31.7 per cent of women owning land alone or jointly, and 42.3 per cent a house.
Food, health and the body
Entitlement over food is the oldest test: women eating last and least is a distribution rule, not a preference. NFHS-5 recorded 57 per cent of women aged 15-49 anaemic, a rise over the previous round; NFHS-6 (2023-24) dropped haemoglobin testing, so the trend is now unmeasured. Sen’s “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing” (1990) is this differential’s demographic endpoint.
Residence, maintenance and widowhood
A woman’s weakest entitlement is shelter. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 created a right to reside in the shared household, and Satish Chander Ahuja v Sneha Ahuja (2020) widened it, overruling S. R. Batra (2006) so the household need not be the husband’s. The widow, historically the most disentitled figure, is Sen’s breakdown position made visible: lacking an independent fallback, she accepts whatever division is offered.
Voice, mobility and earnings
NFHS-5 found 88.7 per cent of married women participating in three household decisions, about 89 per cent in NFHS-6. The paradox is instructive: near-universal voice coexists with minority ownership. Decision-making is granted; resources are not — and paid work does not automatically confer control over earnings.
Why the law under-delivers
- Uma Chakravarti explains the stake: endogamy requires guarding women’s sexuality, so a daughter claiming land threatens caste-and-property order, not merely a brother’s purse.
- “Voluntary” relinquishment persists because claiming means suing a brother and forfeiting the natal home — precisely the fallback Agarwal says entitlement depends on.
- Dowry is offered as the substitute: a pre-mortem, unequal and unrecoverable settlement.
Conclusion
Patriarchy bears on entitlement not at the margin but at the foundation, because it determines the fallback position from which every household claim is made. India has largely closed the gap in rights; what remains open is the gap in command. Entitlement will follow only when a daughter’s claim costs her nothing she cannot afford to lose.