Journal of Agrarian Change,

Women’s Vol. Land

3 No. 4,Rights
October and
2003,the
pp. Trap
571–585.
of Neo-Conservatism 571

Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of

Neo-Conservatism: A Response to Jackson

BINA AGARWAL

In response to Cecile Jackson’s article, I argue here that Jackson has seriously
misrepresented my work, often attributing to me the opposite of what I have
said, and turned nuanced and balanced formulations into one-sided extremes.
I seek to correct the important misrepresentations, as well as outline my
substantive differences with Jackson. In particular, her argument that women
should not claim family land for risk of destabilizing family relations could,
by extension, have deeply conservative implications for all forms of women’s
struggles to enhance their freedoms and capabilities. In many South Asian
communities, conflict is equally inherent in women choosing their own marriage
partners or professions, or seeking gender-equal education, or wanting free-
dom of reproductive choice or free public interaction. The fear of family
conflict could tie women down on numerous such counts as well. Jackson also
overextends the resistance to women’s claims in family land by treating South
Asia as a uniform entity. The analysis in my book on this subject shows a
substantial regional variability in kinship structures and social norms, which
would make for much less resistance in southern South Asia than in the
north, providing promising initial avenues for extending women’s land claims.
Also, unlike Jackson, I do not locate the process of women acquiring land
rights in each woman’s isolated struggle within the family, but in a collective
struggle that seeks to build support across multiple tiers of society.
Keywords: women’s land rights, property rights, neo-conservatism,
South Asia

INTRODUCTION
The editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change ( JAC) have asked me to respond to
Cecile Jackson’s article ( Jackson 2003). Let me say at the outset that I welcome
constructive debate about the value and attainability of land rights for women,
and initially I assumed that was what Jackson’s paper would offer. I was dis-
appointed, however, to find that much of what she presents as mine, and then
criticizes, is based on a set of propositions I do not hold. On numerous counts,
Jackson has misrepresented what I have written, often attributing to me the

Bina Agarwal, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, India. e-mail:
bina@ieg.ernet.in

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2003.

572 Bina Agarwal

opposite of what I have said, or presented balanced and logically argued posi-
tions as one-sided extremes. This obfuscates what could have been an interesting
debate on the actual points of difference (which are several) between Jackson’s
positions and mine. Before those can be spelt out, however, I need to identify
some of the misrepresentations. Since these are extensive, I will not make a
point-by-point rebuttal, but confine myself to the most important of the many
problems with Jackson’s piece.
By way of background, Cecile Jackson has elaborated at some length on my
analysis of gender and land rights. But for understanding my arguments, she has
chosen to focus almost entirely on my JAC paper (Agarwal 2003), whose pur-
pose was limited, and many of the issues she raises do not relate particularly to
that paper but to other writings of mine, especially a 550+ page book: A Field
of One’s Own (Agarwal 1994, henceforth called AFOwn). However, Jackson
appears to have dipped into AFOwn only to cull out a few quotes to disagree
with, without following through with the subsequent analysis, and then used the
JAC article to decry omissions on aspects that the paper was not written to cover.
Whether due to this or for other reasons, she has seriously misinterpreted my
analysis and missed the detailed discussions on relevant aspects that are contained
in AFOwn, including: discussions on the links between kinship, property and
marriage (based on a substantial reading of ethnographic evidence in all its detail
across and within five countries: see chapters 3–4, 6–8); on the complex histor-
ical factors which undermined women’s rights in matrilineal and bilateral com-
munities in South Asia (chapters 3–4); on gender ideology (throughout); and on
the inter-country, intra-country and inter-community diversity of kinship and
gender relations more generally (throughout, but especially chapters 6–8). Clearly,
every paper cannot reproduce the details and nuances of a large book or of all
previous writing, but to fully grasp what I have to say on this subject a careful
reading of the book and some subsequent articles was surely warranted. In any
case, I suggest that readers of this journal read AFOwn in conjunction with
Jackson’s piece.
By doing so, some of the differences between Jackson and myself would
disappear. But on some basic counts there are clearly significant disagreements.
I will therefore divide my response into two main parts. The first will clarify my
position on the important misrepresentations. The second will outline my sub-
stantive differences with some of Jackson’s arguments – arguments that I believe
could have deeply conservative implications for women’s struggles to enhance
their freedoms and capabilities.

MISREPRESENTATIONS: AN ILLUSTRATION
First, Jackson appears to have missed what is general in my argument and what
arises from specificity of context. Gender inequalities in the ownership and con-
trol of property and especially immovable property (and the forms, implications,
causes and correlates of these inequalities), were seriously neglected issues in
scholarship when I wrote AFOwn. And my arguments about the neglect of
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 573

women’s property status and its importance in assessing women’s situation are
general ones, but the emphasis on (arable) land rights is specific to contexts such
as South Asia. In other contexts where there are larger non-farm and/or urban
sectors, other types of productive assets or other forms of property (say houses),
may be more important. And even within South Asia, agricultural land could
over time become less important for livelihoods, with an expansion of non-farm
and/or urban opportunities, as has been happening in Sri Lanka. Much of Jackson’s
own interest and work, to my knowledge, lies in Africa. And no doubt there is
much that is specific to India in my JAC paper that would not apply to Africa.
But had that been Jackson’s starting point, it would have made for an interesting
comparison and constructive dialogue, rather than the approach she has chosen,
which is one of combating (in a personalized way) virtually every argument I
make, even for the context to which it relates.
Second, I do not argue (as Jackson suggests) that land rights in themselves will
transform women’s lives. I emphasize that for land rights to make a difference,
they must be ‘effective’ – they should be rights in practice and not just on paper,
and should give women control over the land in actual terms and not just nomin-
ally. Also, I emphasize that for the land to be productive, women need more
equal access to credit, inputs, technical information, infrastructure and so on.
Here these inputs are complementary to land, not substitutes. (Jackson, quoting
another study, argues that women in sub-Saharan Africa are constrained by lack
of cash and labour not land, presenting this, incorrectly, as an argument against
the centrality of land rights. Presumably cash and labour are important to these
African women farmers as complementary inputs, because they already have some
land, which is not the case for most women in rural India.) More broadly, I
argue, that the process by which the rights are acquired is especially important (see
Agarwal 1994: 44–5):

. . . the question (which I am sometimes asked) – how will providing

women ownership rights in land change gender relations, given the enorm-
ity of gender inequalities in the economic, social and political power struc-
tures – is misleading. It is not just an increase in women’s command over
economic resources, but also the process by which that increase occurs
that has a crucial bearing on gender relations. Land rights are not a ‘given’
and will not be ‘provided’ to most South Asian women without contesta-
tion. Acquiring those rights (as will be made clear from the body of this
book) will require simultaneous struggles against many different facets of
gender inequalities embedded in social norms and practices, access to public
decision-making bodies at every level, gendered ideas and representations,
and so on. It will require shifts in power balances in women’s favour in
several different arenas: within the household, in the community and the
market, and at different tiers of the state apparatus. Even to organize col-
lectively often requires challenging existing norms, such as breaking the
traditional bounds of female seclusion in some communities for attending
public meetings.
574 Bina Agarwal

Land thus has a strategic importance that other gender concerns such as
employment and education appear not to share in equal measure. . . . But it
is precisely the complex and wide-ranging nature of these obstacles that
gives the struggle to overcome them a transformative potential; and this is
also why a successful struggle by women for land is likely to have more
far-reaching implications for gender relations in South Asia than possibly
any other single factor.
Jackson (p. 460) argues in contrast that: ‘the process of acquiring [land] rights
may prove disempowering’ (because of the potential threat to family relations).
But she concludes this, I believe, because she sees the process in terms of each
woman’s isolated struggle within her family, and not (as I do) as a collective
struggle that builds support across multiple tiers. Many of Jackson’s ultimately
conservative (neo-conservative?) and pessimistic conclusions thus stem from her
own (contestable) initial position, rather than mine. In fact, to argue that women
should desist from efforts to alter intra family inequalities because this might
threaten the familial status quo, could itself be disempowering (as elaborated in
part two of this response).
Third, Jackson seriously misconstrues my analysis of intra-family relations,
attributing to me the opposite of what I have said, and turning nuanced and
balanced formulations into caricatured extremes. For instance,
(a) Jackson (p. 472) argues that I do not ‘adequately recognize that the house-
hold is itself a collective enterprise’. Quite the contrary, here is what I say about
households: ‘. . . households can be commensal and residential units, and/or
units of joint property ownership, production, consumption or investment, or
they can constitute some intersection of these dimensions’ (Agarwal 1994: 53).
How much more collectivity in enterprise is it possible to recognize?
(b) Jackson (p. 473) holds that I believe there is ‘no relationship between a
woman’s level of well-being and that of her husband or father’. Quite the con-
trary, I hold that both class and gender matter. As argued at length in AFOwn
(pp. 14–15, emphasis added):
In fact neither deriving women’s class position from the property status of
men nor deriving it from their own propertyless status appears adequate,
although both positions reflect a dimension of reality. Women of large landed
households in South Asia do gain from their husband’s class positions in terms of
their overall living standards, their typically lower work burdens, the social status
and influence they can command in relation to other village women, and so on.
Hence property mediates relationships not only between men and women but also
between women. At the same time there are significant commonalities
between women which cut across derived class privilege (or deprivation),
such as vulnerability to domestic violence; all women’s responsibility for
housework and childcare (even if not all women are obliged to perform
such labour themselves . . . ); gender inequalities in legal rights, and the
risks of marital breakdown due to which even women of rich peasant
households can be left destitute and forced to seek wage work, reflecting
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 575

their propertyless state and economic vulnerability as women. In other words

there is an ambiguous character to women’s class position.

(c) Jackson argues that I see family relations as dominated only by self interest.
On the contrary, my argument is that they are not dominated only by altruism
(as is commonly assumed in unitary models of the household in economics).
Further, I argue that women are not the sole repositories of altruism as is
assumed in some of the feminist literature. As outlined in Agarwal (1997), house-
holds are arenas where both self interest and altruism prevail; where both women
and men can be motivated by altruism and self interest, and where both may be
concerned with individual and family welfare. Consider the quote below (Agarwal
1997: 27, emphasis added):
The recognition that women, like men, may be motivated by self interest
(rather than only or mainly by altruism), and that both women and men may be
concerned with individual as well as family welfare, even if in different
degrees, and even if their overt actions place them on different sides of the
spectrum, also focuses attention more directly on the material constraints
that shape women’s behaviour. It cautions against explanations which are
biological in their thrust (‘women are by “nature” more self sacrificing’)
. . . just as it cautions against assuming that self interest is the only motivating
factor.
(d) Jackson (pp. 472, 477) insists that I assume ‘a complete separation of male
and female interests within a household,’ and that I view ‘the family and house-
holds as only institutions of repression and exploitation, obstacles to be over-
come’. On the contrary, I centrally recognize that male and female interests are
both separate and intertwined, and that families are institutions of both sharing
and selfishness. The conceptual framework I offer for understanding gender
dynamics within the household is the bargaining framework spelt out both in
AFOwn (Chapter 2) and in subsequent papers. Within this framework, intra-
household interaction is characterized as containing elements of both cooperation
and conflict. Household members cooperate insofar as cooperative arrangements
make each of them better off than non-cooperation. However, many different
outcomes are possible in terms of the division of goods, tasks, etc. These out-
comes are beneficial to the concerned parties relative to non-cooperation. But
among the set of cooperative outcomes, some are more favourable than others to
each party – hence the underlying conflict between those cooperating. Which
outcomes emerge depends on the relative (and often implicit) bargaining power
of the household members, and may or may not involve any explicit process
of negotiation (see also Sen 1990). In this formulation, some commonality of
interest is an essential element. If indeed I had assumed a complete separation of
male and female interests within the household, where would be the scope for
intra-family cooperation, or possibly for marriage itself ?
It is important to recognize that the context of my discussion was main-
stream economic literature, which has tended to largely neglect the possibility of
576 Bina Agarwal

intra-household conflict. As I say quite explicitly in another paper (Agarwal

1998a: A8) to which Jackson refers:

It appears necessary to dislodge from its position of primacy the con-

ventional model of a harmonious male-headed family in both analysis
and policy, and recognize the family for what it is: a unit of both cooperation
and conflict, of both sharing and selfishness; where women and men can have
different interests, preferences and motivations, where self-interest also
enters, and where allocations are often unequal and affected by differential
bargaining power. Despite the emerging consensus among gender-aware
economists around the validity of the bargaining framework for under-
standing intra-household dynamics, ideologically the unitary household
model holds strong. If we are to think of radical and effective interven-
tions, a shift to more realistic assumptions about intrafamily behaviour and
a gender perspective in planning are thus critical.
It is, of course, possible that underlying Jackson’s misreading of this point is a
disciplinary divide, but it seems to me that my position is so clearly stated as to
leave little room for misconstruing. And even a disciplinary divide requires some
attempt to familiarize oneself with the lay of the land before ‘aiming and firing’.
Fourth, Jackson’s misreading (and associated misrepresentation) of my analysis
of intra-household dynamics as dominated only by conflict also spills over into
her misconstruing my argument on individual and joint titles for women. For a
start, my discussion on joint titles relates to government distributed land and not
as a demand ‘from husbands’. Moreover, I do not argue, as Jackson (p. 458)
holds, that under all circumstances ‘women should have individual ownership
and control of land’, nor do I present ‘individual ownership as the ideal form of
property control’. I argue that both individual and joint titles have pros and cons,
but given the problems with both we also need to encourage women’s group
control over land where feasible (indeed, at least a third of my JAC piece is about
group farming). Let me quote from two parts of my JAC paper (pp. 201–2, 206):
While having some land is better than none, joint titles with husbands also
present problems for women. For instance, women often find it difficult to
gain control over the produce, or to bequeath the land as they want, or to
claim their shares in case of marital conflict. As some Bihari rural women
told me: ‘For retaining the land we would be tied to the man, even if he
beat us’. Wives may also have different land use priorities from husbands
which they would be less in a position to exercise with joint titles. Most
of all, joint titles constrain women from exploring alternative farming
arrangements collectively with other women.
Individual titles, in contrast, can provide more flexibility. At the same
time, individual women often lack enough investible funds, and with small
holdings individual investment in capital equipment can prove uneconom-
ical. For instance, although the Bodhgaya movement in Bihar enabled many
women to receive an acre each in their own names, several of them had to
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 577

mortgage their holdings later because they lacked funds for profitable cul-
tivation. . . . Individual women landowners also face considerable pressure
from male relatives who want to control the land themselves.

To bypass these problems, I argue, ‘a possible solution could be to encourage

collective investment and cultivation’ (p. 202).
Similarly, there is little ground for Jackson to infer from my argument about
group farming for poor women that I am assuming only self-interest within the
home and altruism in the extra-household collective farming sphere. Altruism
does not need to be the basis for group farming (or for any group activity for
that matter – be it trade unions, credit groups, self-help groups, community
forestry groups, water users associations, or whatever). There are many per-
fectly straightforward reasons stemming from self-interest that would make it
beneficial for women farmers to function as a group: access to subsidized credit,
economies of scale in farming, pooling of a diversity of skills and talents within
the group, strengthening their voice in dealing with governmental institutions,
and so on. When women’s interest appears better served by leaving the group,
they also sometimes do so (see examples in my JAC paper).
Basically, arguments suggesting that women should organize separately do
not presume either self-interest or altruism. They rest on the fact that gender
disadvantage potentially creates a commonality of interests – which could be
either strategic or sisterly, or both. But, as has been emphasized repeatedly
within both international and national women’s movements – organizing separ-
ately does not mean being separatist. Forging solidarities outside the family and
kinship networks does not mean a rejection of either family or community. To
infer the latter, as Jackson seems to be doing, would place her closer to the
conservative right than she might be comfortable with.
Fifth, Jackson (p. 475) also misrepresents me by insisting that I see bargaining
power and material outcomes as ‘simply determined by ownership of assets’. On
the contrary, I argue in AFOwn and several subsequent papers (in particular,
Agarwal 1997), that women’s bargaining power in all arenas (family, market and
state) is centrally mediated by non-economic factors, in particular by social norms
and social perceptions. I also give centrality to women’s access to traditional
social support systems such as via kinship or friendship, as well as support from
NGOs and the state. However, a critical material resource such as land can carry
particular weight in largely agrarian economies. Also, in such contexts, land
would not only be a significant factor affecting women’s bargaining power in
relation to other needs, but would itself need to be bargained for.
Moreover, in Agarwal (1997) I discuss at length the many ways in which
social norms (and perceptions) can affect bargaining power, how norms may
shape the way bargaining itself is conducted, and what factors may affect women’s
ability to bargain over social norms themselves. In addition, AFOwn contains a
lengthy discussion on how ideological constructions of gender constrain women.
Given this, certainly there is little need, on my account, for Jackson to belabour
that norms, ideas, values etc. are also important sources of power. At the same
578 Bina Agarwal

time, I think it important to go beyond simply saying that something is import-

ant to outline why it is the case. As spelt out in AFOwn, I see the relationship
between gender ideology and property as a dialectical one, and emphasize the
need to understand the political economy of ideological construction. Among
the interconnections between gender ideology and property outlined in AFOwn
(chapter 1) are the following: (a) gender ideologies can obstruct women from
getting property rights – e.g. ideological assumptions about women’s needs,
work roles, capabilities, and so on; (b) those who own or control property can
exercise direct and indirect influence over the principal institutions that shape
ideology (educational bodies, religious establishments, the media, etc.); and (c)
the impact of gender ideologies can vary according to women’s household prop-
erty status, and in a non-linear way.
Sixth, Jackson’s claim, that I treat kinship, marriage and family as ‘social
obstacles’ is, at the very least, puzzling. What I identify as social ‘constraints’ are
not families and communities per se, but a range of social norms and practices,
such as female seclusion practices, the ideology of purdah, long-distance post-
marital residence, marriage at young ages to strangers and so on, as well as social
perceptions about women’s lower needs and contributions (which undermine
the social legitimacy of their claims). These social factors mediate women’s eco-
nomic situation in relation to both property and employment. But these factors
also vary across regions and communities, for instance they are less constraining
in southern South Asia than in, say, north-western South Asia. A reading of
AFOwn’s chapters 6–8 and especially the maps of chapter 8 would have made
this clear.
So far I have sought to illustrate what I see variously as Jackson’s misrepresen-
tation, misreading or non-reading of my work. Let me now outline what I see as
genuine differences between us.

AGAINST NEO-CONSERVATISM: SUBSTANTIVE DIFFERENCES

Jackson and I differ substantively both on the importance of property rights/land
rights for women and in our approach to the issue of family conflict and the
prospects for women’s empowerment.
On the first, I still hold that property rights in general (be it in land, other
productive assets, housing, or other forms) are likely to be of critical importance
for women in multiple contexts; and land as a form of property would be of
particular importance in the context of South Asia’s largely agrarian population.
Education and employment can complement property/land rights but cannot
entirely substitute for them (Agarwal 2000). My welfare, efficiency and empower-
ment arguments for gender equality in land rights (apart from the importance
of equality per se), are much more detailed and broad based in AFOwn than in the
JAC paper, where for brevity I was selective. On the efficiency issue (taking
both productive efficiency and efficiency in the more general sense of meeting
the goals of a programme such as for poverty alleviation), what I sought to do in
AFOwn, given the limited empirical evidence at that time, is to provide pointers
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 579

rather than make definitive or universal claims. We need more research on this
from different regions in different contexts, but no research can emerge unless
the question itself is admitted. For instance, in the voluminous economics liter-
ature on the land/efficiency issues, while households are expected to respond to
economic incentives (such as security of tenure, the output share of the cultivator,
etc.) there is little recognition that incentives might also matter within the home.
AFOwn presented a range of arguments (some inferential) to make the efficiency
case and flagged the issue as important for further probing. The empirical studies
that have since emerged, such as by Udry et al. (1995), the Kenyan study cited in
Elson (1995) and the research summarized in Quisumbing (1996) have opened
the field further. While we need more research, that which exists is adequate for
providing significant pointers and emphasizing that this is not a trivial issue; nor
indeed are issues such as the links between women’s property rights and their
sense of empowerment, or their own and their children’s welfare.
If anything, new empirical research is tending to reinforce the importance of
effective rights in land and property for women, to enhance their own and their
children’s welfare. For instance, a recent study (Panda and Agarwal 2003) on the
impact of women’s property status on spousal violence in Kerala shows that the
incidence of long-term physical violence by husbands on wives was as high as
49 per cent where the woman owned neither land nor a house, but it was 18 per
cent where the woman owned land and 7 per cent where she owned both. The
strong negative relationship between woman’s property status and spousal violence
held even after controlling for factors such as the household’s economic status,
both spouses’ education and employment status, social support from family and
neighbours, age, number of children, etc. In other words, women owning immov-
able property (land or house) face a substantially lower risk of violence than
women owning no such property.
Findings such as these and others cannot be set aside by Jackson’s (p. 468)
argument that: ‘Indian women’s sense of themselves, their personhood, seems to
me rarely to implicate land ownership in the ways mentioned for men above,
and I doubt that it holds a place in their subjectivities to rival the importance of
child bearing, marital success, a respected occupation or social position, an achieved
level of security, personal autonomy and so on.’ Apart from her untenable gen-
eralization about ‘Indian women’ as a uniform all-embracing category, this is a
problematic argument on at least two counts. One, it assumes that social posi-
tion, security, a respected occupation and personal autonomy are all independent
of women’s material situation, including their property status. Two, it does not
recognize that if something does not enter women’s sense of themselves at a
given point in time, it could be due to their lack of perceived options at that point
in time. Expanding women’s prospects of property ownership would be an
important step toward broadening those options.
Jackson’s argument also reveals an inherent contradiction in her position, in
that while acknowledging that expressed wants can be an imperfect representa-
tion of real well-being, she then reemphasizes subjective notions of well-being. I
believe Jackson’s contradictions bring to light a larger, unresolved intellectual
580 Bina Agarwal

dilemma: on the one hand it is necessary to recognize that the disadvantaged may
adapt or imperfectly represent their preferences and needs; on the other hand it is
important to give weight to the voices and stated preferences of the disadvant-
aged. There appears to be no clear way of resolving this tension. But expanding
women’s options would be relevant on either count.
Recognizing the importance of women having effective rights in property or
land does not imply, however, that acquiring those rights will be easy. Jackson
(p. 465) is incorrect in her insistence that ‘Agarwal minimises male resistance’.
Even a quick read of the last chapter of AFOwn, entitled ‘The Long March
Ahead’, would remove this misperception. Jackson, in fact, infers my position
from a note I quote, sent by the member of a South African NGO who found
that male resistance was less than they had anticipated when they raised the
question of women’s land claims in their field sites. This reference was to a
specific context and setting. On the general issue, I pay substantial attention to
male resistance (and associated factors), centrally recognizing the complex social
relations within which women are embedded, and which could obstruct their
claims in family land. At the same time, it is important to note that kinship
structures and social norms are highly variable across South Asia, and the regional
analysis offered in AFOwn (especially chapters 3–4, 6–8) spells out these dif-
ferences at length, pointing to the relatively more women-friendly contexts of
South India and Sri Lanka, where the situation would prove less difficult than
say in north-west India. Arguments about complexity can become counter pro-
ductive after a point, and obscure both variability and possibility.
Moreover, Jackson’s underlying messages for dealing with complexity are
deeply conservative. She argues (p. 458), for instance, that: ‘The potential gains
from claiming individual land rights from husbands will be set against the
potential threat to marital stability’. Elsewhere, she emphasizes the risk to family
relations in women claiming land from natal families; and yet elsewhere (p. 466),
that women might be better off investing ‘in a reputation as a deserving wife’. In
her stance, she would find interesting bedfellows among the most conservative
of Indian policy makers from the 1940s to the present. In 1948, for instance,
opponents of the Hindu Code Bill, which was meant to provide women sub-
stantial rights in property, argued at an All-India Anti-Hindu Code Convention,
that ‘the introduction of women’s share in inheritance’ would cause a ‘disruption
of the Hindu family system which has throughout the ages acted as a cooperative
institution for the preservation of family ties, family property and family stability’
(cited in Kumar 1983: 98). Again, in the 1949 Constituent Assembly debates on
the Code, some legislators asked: ‘Are you going to enact a code which will
facilitate the breaking up of our households?’ (GOI 1949: 1011), and ‘spell nothing
but disaster’ (GOI 1949: 917). Despite such opposition, in 1956 the Hindu Succes-
sion Act was passed, substantially enhancing Hindu women’s property rights in
law. But old attitudes continue to surface, as for instance in 1989, when a former
agricultural minister from Haryana said to me at a land reform seminar: ‘Are you
suggesting that women should be given rights to land? What do women want –
to break up the family?’ If this is indeed a valid fear, we need to ask: what kinds
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 581

of families do we have that the moment women have property they will want to
leave them? Or the moment women ask for their just claims, they would forfeit
all family affection?
In any case, if everything difficult were to be set aside on the argument that
it might cause intra-family conflict, then where would we go with women’s
struggles over reproductive rights, or over gender-equal education, or over their
freedom to choose their marriage partners or professions, and so on? Although
made largely in the context of land rights, the logic of Jackson’s argument that
women should seek refuge in families and not risk rocking the family boat has
larger ramifications, since land (or other property) is not the only potential source
of gender conflict within families. In many South Asian communities, conflict is
equally inherent in a daughter wanting to pursue higher education, which might
mean studying in coeducational institutions, or in a daughter choosing her own
marriage partner (especially if from another caste or religion), or in a woman
wanting the freedom of reproductive choice, or of free interaction outside the
home in purdah-conscious societies. The road can be as difficult on any of these
counts. But is that an adequate reason for forgoing efforts to enhance one’s
capabilities? And what of the implicit conflicts and violence embedded in unequal
resource allocations and unequal freedoms within families, on which there is
voluminous evidence?
Indeed, it is not clear what kind of idealized Indian family Jackson has in
mind. There are a large and growing number of de facto female-headed families as
a result of widowhood, marital breakdown or male outmigration: estimates range
from 20 per cent to 35 per cent. Although, compared with the West, formal
divorce rates are still low, they are rising (Pothen 1989). And figures on formal
divorce do not capture the vast numbers of desertions and of men remarrying
without divorce. Systematic data on the levels of ‘social divorce’ (as versus legal
divorce) and dual marriages are scarce, but surveys by activists in some regions
reveal a serious phenomenon. A 1987 survey estimated around 0.6 million
deserted women in Maharashtra state alone. They came from both poor and
middle-class homes, and most had problems finding jobs and shelter, and feeding
their children. Although the activists took up their cause, rehabilitation was con-
strained by the women’s lack of independent economic means (Datar and Upendra 1993).
Jackson argues that women will be ‘bloodied’ if they seek to claim family
land. But large numbers are being bloodied anyway. A recent study by the
International Clinical Epidemiologists Network (INCLEN 2000) of about 10,000
ever-married women across seven Indian states, found that 40.3 per cent had
been physically abused in multiple ways, typically several times during their
married lives; and some 50 per cent of those physically abused reported violence
during pregnancy. In contrast, as the Kerala study (quoted earlier) found, women’s
ownership of property can substantially reduce the probability of spousal viol-
ence. Owning a house or land provides a visible indicator of the strength of a
woman’s fall-back position and a tangible exit option that can deter a husband
from physically assaulting his wife, making for better marriages and more women-
friendly families.
582 Bina Agarwal

Similarly, property obtained as daughters would enhance security during

widowhood. Jackson makes much of the figures I give from a survey that found
that 51 per cent of widows whose husbands owned land inherited some. But she
ignores my note of caution in interpreting this, namely that most widows in
practice inherit land from their marital families only if they have sons; that the
land, if registered, is jointly with sons; that the sons typically control the land
and view it basically as a means to cover their mothers’ subsistence; and that
widows constitute only about 11 per cent of females over the age of ten in rural
India – most widows being above 50 years of age, when they are less able to put
in labour for cultivation (Agarwal 1998b). The recognition of widows’ inheritance
claims (even if restricted) is of course a good thing, but it cannot compensate
them for their disinheritance as daughters, which could enhance their bargaining
power while their husbands are still alive. That a fair percentage of widows’ claims
are today nominally recognized (which wasn’t the case that long ago) does not,
therefore, justify Jackson’s inference (p. 466) that ‘marriage is a more successful
need claim for women, than the parental contract’ or that ‘entitlement to support
from a husband, or his family, is a more reliable and less risky basis for gaining
access to land’. In any case, earlier Jackson had warned against women claiming
land even from husbands, since that could threaten marital stability. What this
would imply is that women should forfeit claims from both the parental and the
marital family, for the uncertain prospect of gaining some land during widow-
hood! And, even for widows, I believe Jackson does not appreciate the import-
ance of independent control over property, although many widows themselves
recognize that if they had their own land and assets their families would treat
them better – indeed those who have property often use it to explicitly bargain
with family members, promising favour to those who serve them best (Basu 1999).
Just as I do not share Jackson’s conservatism, so I do not share her pessimism,
which I believe stems (as mentioned earlier) from (a) her focusing only on indi-
vidual women’s prospects of claiming their land shares within landed families,
and (b) from her treating the whole of South Asia as uniform in terms of kinship,
marriage and inheritance patterns, as well as in terms of social norms and family
resistance to women’s claims. She notes (p. 476): ‘the expectation that many
married women will . . . claim land within landed households in south Asia is
unrealistic’. I would agree if I were basing my expectations on women claiming
land in individual isolation, or on women in every region staking a claim simul-
taneously, or on this happening overnight. As I have argued at length in AFOwn
and elsewhere, a woman’s ability to successfully claim her family share will
depend on a range of factors, in particular, her access to economic and social
support from gender progressive groups (including women’s groups), her mem-
bership in such a group itself, the support she gets from government officials and
policies, her education status and legal literacy, the social legitimacy of her claims,
and so on. In other words, group support matters, as do regional variations in
social resistance. Where such factors are favourable to women, much might be
possible: my regional analysis in AFOwn suggests that social resistance is likely
to be much less in southern South Asia. So that would be the place to start. In
other words, I am less pessimistic than Jackson because unlike her I do not see
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 583

either India or South Asia as an undifferentiated space, but one where there are
varying degrees of constraints and hence potential for change. And I do not
expect change to happen overnight.
Even on something that Jackson takes as a truism and regarding which she
makes some heroic generalizations for the whole of South Asia, there is regional
variation: Jackson (p. 476) says ‘. . . most women who manage to obtain land
in south Asia leave it to their sons, where they can’. Yet we only have to turn to
Sri Lanka to refute this: here both sons and daughters of landed families com-
monly inherit land (albeit unequally) across all the major communities. And
among the Jaffna Tamils, customarily mothers gave their land only to daughters
in dowry (as pre-mortem inheritance), with the result that in some Jaffna villages
over 70 per cent of the total land was found to be owned by women in the 1960s
(AFOwn, p. 267). Similarly, Jackson’s statement (p. 477): ‘Collective cultivation
by women is unlikely to become widely popular and successful’ is conjectural,
and at best based on one case study for North Cameroon, and takes no account
of cultural variability across countries or communities. Surely variations in
kinship structures and social norms also exist across Africa, which Jackson has
presented largely in general terms. Had Jackson paid more attention to her own
homily on the importance of recognizing historical and ethnographic diversity –
a point with which I agree – she might have found some interesting regional
patterns there as well.
Jackson’s argument that the Indian women’s movement has not taken up the
issue of land rights, because rural women do not consider this issue important
and are indifferent to land rights, is similarly flawed. It ignores the historical
specificity of why certain social movements emerge at particular points in time,
what issues they focus on, and what constraints they operate under. In Bihar’s
Bodhgaya movement and Maharastra’s Shetkari Sanghatana movement of the
late 1970s–1980s, the focus on women’s land claims also stemmed from particu-
lar factors and actors, which distinguished these movements from the peasant
movements of the 1940s (see for example, AFOwn, chapter 9). But the absence
of a social movement around a particular issue is not an adequate barometer of its
lack of importance. For instance, Kandiyoti (2003: 253–4) notes: ‘The cry for
land among rural women in Uzbekistan is clamorous’, but it is ‘difficult . . . to
envisage how landless or poor women’s organized interests might be represented
in a context where neither civil organizations, such as NGOs or professional
associations, nor political parties or social movements have a significant pres-
ence’. Or, taking an example from India, just twenty years ago there was little
environmental focus in most social movements (barring one or two), but this did
not imply that the issue either lacked importance for rural dwellers or was an
easy one for anyone to take up. Yet today many environmental groups have
emerged, and there is a growing mobilization around environmental concerns.
Similarly (as spelt out briefly in my JAC paper) many gender-progressive
organizations in South Asia are today increasingly keen to take up the issue of
women’s land claims. None of these groups is starting with ‘blanket prescrip-
tions’; rather, I expect they will evolve creative solutions relevant to their cultural
and ecological contexts. Also, it is after grassroots consultations across the globe
584 Bina Agarwal

that the UN Commission on Human Rights has made the issue of women’s
rights to adequate housing and land the focus of its global mobilization, involv-
ing governments, UN agencies and civil society (UNCHR 2003; see also Benschop
2002). This is not the point of ‘policy closure’ but rather of its opening up.
Incidentally, Jackson does injustice to the Laxmi Mukti campaign spearheaded
by the women’s front of the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra by dismissing
the movement’s efforts to have husbands transfer portions of their land to their
wives as merely feeding into men’s strategies to escape land ceilings. Many of the
farmers involved owned below-ceiling holdings. And the movement was launched
in the 1980s, long after the government had acquired most ceiling surplus land
and there was no new push toward land reform in that state.

SOME TRIVIA
To end, let me touch on some small points made much of by Jackson. In my
JAC paper, I reproduced Jackson’s following comment: ‘I have also worked in
Zimbabwe, where I was surprised at how few women expressed a demand for
land and were in fact more interested in employment . . .’. My subsequent state-
ment, however, was based not just on her comment, but also on those of some
others, when I noted: ‘This line of argument is disquieting because it assumes
that voiced concern (or its lack) is a sufficient indicator of needs and preferences,
and an adequate basis for social policy’ (Agarwal 2003: 189). Quite apart from
the fact that I quoted Jackson with her prior permission, and with her full know-
ledge of the context in which her comment was being used (so she has little
justification for now labelling my statement ‘bizarre’), Jackson agrees with my
overall point about adapted or imperfectly revealed preferences. I would, of
course, have welcomed seeing her writings on this, had she then brought them
to my attention. Notably though, her emphasis on subjectivities in her current
piece appears to contradict her stated stance on adapted preferences.
On a related point, so trivial that I would have ignored it, had Jackson not
devoted an entire paragraph on p. 455 of her paper to it, seeking to give a
theoretical garb to what was just a careless reading of my work: the quote on p.
215 of my JAC paper (for which Jackson says the speaker is unclear) is clearly
attributed by me to Satheesh (look above the quote), and on p. 206 of my article,
I also clearly say that P.V. Satheesh is founder member and Director of DDS.
Similarly, Jackson makes much of my putting quotation marks on a personal
communication from a senior scholar, namely words spoken by peasant women
in Bengal in 1979. This highly respected scholar and activist has also published
that quote. And how else would you put a quote taken from someone else if not
in quotation marks?
Finally, neither my book, AFOwn, nor my JAC article or other papers were
written as ammunition for policy makers to ‘ready, aim, fire’ (as Jackson sug-
gests). That policy makers occasionally dip into and get influenced by large
academic books is perhaps not a bad thing. But that they might sometimes draw
simplistic conclusions from complex arguments is surely their own responsibility
– to which the usual disclaimers should apply!
 Women’s Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism 585

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