The journey of women's rights in India has neither been easier nor kinder, especially in dealing with religion-based personal laws, which closely influence marital rights and yet are often considered the greatest site of oppression. Yet, lawyer Mihira Sood revisits this painstaking journey in her latest book, 'Courting Equality: Landmark Cases In The Battle For Women's Rights'.

The book is divided into 5 parts (Mathura to MeToo: The Story of a Nation, In the Family, At Work, Public Participation, and Freedom from Religion). The first chapter of the book allows the reader to have an understanding of how the feminist movement began in India. Interestingly, it explores a tension that feminists continue to deal with, which is why women continue to believe in the transformative capacity of law despite the fact that the legal system continues to be deeply patriarchal.

The early chapters identify certain triggering points where either the law, the court, or society has failed women, for the subsequent chapters to show that reforms didn't happen overnight. For instance, in one of her chapters, Sood talks about how the 'Rang De Basanti' movie had become a catalyst for youth activism in those days, and how it helped in shaping the youth protest in the aftermath of the Jessica Lal murder trial, in which a high-ranking politician's son was ultimately convicted, and also the 2012 brutal Nirbhaya gangrape. But the reality is, the movie was merely a triggering point.

The truth is, women collectives have started working since the 1980s on criminal reforms in the aftermath of two disastrous judgments in the infamous Mathura custodial rape(1972) and the Rameeza Bee rape case(1978). It was the public outrage that led to the Criminal Law Amendment, 1983, overhauling the rape laws, the concept of consent, and the recognition of power imbalance in cases involving public officers. It was these earlier continuous attempts that had ultimately led to the JS Varma Committee reforms.

Not many know, but Sood was one of the youngest members who assisted the JS Varma Committee, which was formed to quell the public outrage in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya gangrape incident. The committee recommended major criminal reforms, most particularly in recognising that rape and sexual assault are not merely crimes of passion but an expression of power. It recommended that the exception to marital rape should be removed.

In her chapter on 'Bound By Marriage,' the author explores an interesting take on oppression faced by women in marriage through the Constitution Bench judgment in Joseph Shine(2019), which decriminalised adultery. While pointing out the obvious that the crime of adultery was seen as an offence against a husband committed by another man(since it assumed that a woman in a marriage had no agency to consent), Sood visits the underrated aspect of this judgment through the lens of privacy.

She remarks that privacy is a double-edged sword for women because, on one hand, it has been termed as a right of men to be left alone to oppress women(as Catharine MacKinnon calls it).

Privacy is often the ground taken by the State to defend marital rape and violence within marriage, arguing that Courts have no business inside the bedroom. At the same time, the author points out the irony that privacy holds great potential for women to exercise agency in terms of “personal intimacies,” as the Constitution bench in Justice KS Puttaswamy(which recognised the fundamental right to privacy under Article 21) puts it.

Sood says that in Joseph Shine, the Supreme Court, instead of limiting itself to whether adultery as an offence is discriminatory, chose to ask the right question: 'Whether the State had any business in punishing adultery at all'. In doing so, the Court also demarcated a bright line when privacy can or can't be invoked.

She writes: “Is marriage a public institution which the law ought to protect by punishing adultery? Or is it a private one, where adulterous relations can be a ground for divorce but not criminality? If a marital home is a private space, free from outside interference, how does that mean women cannot avail legal protection for acts committed within it? To answer this question, it[the Supreme Court] had to find a bright line demarcating when privacy can be invoked and when it cannot, and the Court correctly located that line to equality and dignity…By locating this line in constitutional ideals rather than the sanctity of marriage or social norms, the Court has created an opening for women to be able to use privacy rights in a way that actually serves their need—protection for live-in relationships, for example, or the right to choose one's faith and, significantly, to exercise sexual autonomy.”

Closely linked to privacy are personal laws governing marital rights, which are influenced by religious dictates. In many chapters, the author routinely invokes the “ghost” of the 1951 Narasu Appa Mali (where the Bombay High Court held that personal laws are immune from being tested against the touchstone of fundamental rights), a judgment that remains unchallenged to date.

Sood writes that, unlike the Joseph Shine judgment, which asked the right question, the Court in Narasu's case has regularly performed interpretative gymnastics even when it got regular chances over a decade to overrule it in decisions like Shah Bano(1985), Daniel Latifi(2001), Shayara Bano(2017), or the Sabarimala judgment(2018).

In the Sabarimala judgment, where a challenge was made to the practice of barring menstruating women from entering the Sabarimala temple, former Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud wrote on the implications that the Narasu judgment continues to have on this case, considering that it was argued that the practice is a custom not falling within 'law in force' under Article 13. Former CJI rejected this argument, holding that custom, usages, and personal laws significantly impact the civil status of individuals and therefore can't remain outside the scrutiny of the Constitution. However, he left it for future benches to decide. The author does question whether the solution of Narasu judgment is a Uniform Civil Code.

Overall, the good thing about every chapter is that it blends feminist theories and movements, popular culture through songs and Bollywood, and legal development, making it an essential read for a layman to grasp. At the same time, the book reveals that every period of feminist advancement is followed by a period of backlash, the latter sometimes led by women or taken advantage of by men.

It's a great recommendation for law schools because the book is basically like a reader, as the author has used a neutral tone to write the chapters. If one needs to go through all the developments that have taken place in women's rights movements through the socio-legal lens, this would be a great choice. However, certain parts of the book may feel repetitive and may feel a bit disoriented, but everything gets well-connected at the end.

The book is a great reminder that if women of the past didn't learn to walk, the women of the present wouldn't have learned to run.