Property Rights Of Hindu Women: Critical Analysis

Avantika Rawat, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun

ABSTRACT

Hindu women's legitimate right to acquire property has been limited from the earliest times in Indian culture. In the antiquated text Manusmriti, Manu expresses: “Her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth and her sons protect her in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.” However, ladies were not prohibited 100% of the time from acquiring versatile or unfaltering property from genealogical and conjugal families. Yet, their extent of offer in the property was definitely not exactly that of their male partners.

From the beginning of time, limitations on Hindu women's property rights have undergone change, and current regulations administering these privileges are more liberal than those of old Hindu society. Male centric Hindu society provided women with property known as stridhan (in a real sense, womens' property or fortune), and it predominantly came from marriage gifts (clothes, jewelry, and in a few interesting cases, landed properties). Nonetheless, ladies were denied property rights to the genealogical or conjugal landed property, and their directly over progression of the landed family property was restricted. With the rise of various schools of Hindu regulation, the idea of stridhan began growing its exacting and legitimate importance, conceding ladies more freedoms to specific types of property. Afterward, the nineteenth and twentieth hundreds of years saw the section of a few bits of regulation that were expected to eliminate a greater amount of the boundaries to full and approach property freedoms for Hindu ladies. Most recently, sexual discrimination in Hindu progression rules was generally suspended by the new Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act (2005).