She's Come Undone: Parsi Women's Property and Propriety under the Law

Abstract

Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), like many religious groups, manage their ritual spaces and funds with charitable trusts. High numbers of intermarriage have caused much debate over who counts as a Parsi within the community, and more attention is being paid to women and their rights of access. After a local trust in Valsad, Gujarat, barred intermarried women from entering Zoroastrian sacred spaces, Goolrukh Gupta, an intermarried Parsi woman, sued her trust in the high court. It ruled that Gupta was no longer a Parsi but a Hindu, like her husband, even though she had married under the Special Marriage Act of 1954, which enables civil marriage. Offering fresh insight into debates on the politics of recognition and the potentialities and pitfalls for women who appeal to the law to secure their communal rights, I argue that the mechanism of the trust allows the analysis of the two distinct but not separable notions of property and propriety. I analyze how the communal trust in India propertizes married women's legal and religious personhood. This article reveals how Indian women's composition as communal subjects as well as some aspirations of Indian secularism come undone.

Two Fire Temples and a Metro: Contesting Infrastructures in Mumbai

“…Legal historian Mitra Sharafi (2014), has extensively shown how keenly and frequently Parsis have turned to the courts to solve their internal disputes and protect and even form their communal identity historically. 16 My ethnographic research in contemporary Mumbai confirmed this pattern, as a large number of my interlocutors were parties in civil disputes especially over rights to communal, trust-managed properties (Vevaina, 2018). Legal activism is also commonly taken up by a few individuals, like Farhad and Sukhadwalla, who have the legal knowledge or assistance to pursue a case in court, infamous in India to be expensive as they often run for many years.…”

“…This management was consolidated in establishing the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP), a trust and the legal mechanism for managing much Parsi sacred space in the city. This form of communal management has become critically important in Parsi governance and spatial politics in the city (Vevaina, 2018).…”

Mergers and Legal Fictions: Coverture and Intermarried Women in India

“…The settlement and trust were such instruments, and it is this perhaps implicit entanglement of kinship and property that emerged in much of my research with Parsis in Mumbai. 15 English women's property was held under coverture through the nineteenth century, yet these laws were never transferred over to the Indian colony explicitly. Indian marriage laws were governed and amended through a variegated history of personal laws.…”

Property without Prosperity: Subjective Valuation, Financial Citizenship, and Negotiating Moral Personhood among Manufactured Homeowners

“…In her ethnographic study of Parsi property law, Leilah Vevaina (2018) describes how compositional identities are construed in relation to property rights, and in particular are defined through contextualized membership claims. Likewise, Boulder MHC residents argued that it was through their housing, regardless of its age or condition, that their community membership was solidified.…”