MANY YEARS AGO WHEN I BECAME A LAWYER, I knew my work would be dedicated to justice for women. This led me to represent women at the workplace but also equally importantly within the family.
Women who were thrown out of the matrimonial home, women who were dependent homemakers, who created safe harbours in their homes but received no recognition for their labour, women who were compelled to have sex with their husbands and women deprived of custody to their children came to me asking the question: “What can I do to be able to live in a violence free home ?”
For a long time, I had no answer to this question except to say: “In all such situations, it was the men seeking a divorce and the women resisting it.” They resisted it not necessarily because they wanted to stay in the marriage, but because they knew that once divorced, they would be thrown out with empty hands. The stigma of being a divorced woman meant civil death.
It was then that I realised that “family law”, as a legal category, did not quite fit, or address, the issues at hand. The family was not necessarily a safe harbour for women. It was always regarded as a “man’s castle”. I also realised that different laws functioned in silos and there was no overarching norm to guide decision makers in how to deal with the situation, how to do justice . It was the vision of the Constitution of India and its embodiment of the rule of law with guaranteed rights that was missing from consideration in conflict situations and in decision making. In fact one judge of the Delhi High Court said that introducing constitutional law into family law was like introducing “a bull in a China shop”. He failed to realise that the bull was already there. Violence was the governing norm of the family, a privilege of the male.
It was the bull that had to be taken out of the China shop.
