Articles by Nalini Rajan

The tussle between the state and the personal laws has been on for sometime now among both the Hindus and Muslims. But the representatives of neither community are very clear about the kind of reforms that can be undertaken in their personal laws. This is because of a collusion of complex factors such as patriarchy and religion. This article makes an interesting comparison between the Shah Bano case of the mid-1980s and the Rakhmabai case of a century ago and tries to explore the possibility of reforms in personal laws of both the communities.

This essay examines the headscarf controversy as an illustration of the struggle between those modernist analysts who push the limits of the possible, and those postmodernists who push the limits of the impossible, as well as of the anthropological reformulation of the political theory of secularism.

Whether it is dalit politics or feminist struggles, more and more analysts are focusing on the realm of embodied experience involving groups rather than on abstract rationalist theory involving individuals. The obvious question is: can communities, like caste groups, be viewed as legitimate categories within the framework of liberal modernity? This essay explores the idea that group-centred 'embodied experience' may be no more than a phantom category. The emergence of this third category in order to bypass the tradition-modernity or communalism-secularism dyad, may turn out to be without much substance.

The irony of the Rawlsian legacy is that the difference principle has aroused the maximum interest in precisely those countries where social welfare policies have been the most developed - whereas in developing and more economically backward countries, like India, this aspect of Rawls's early work has been virtually ignored. The Indian political scientist's implicit refusal to engage with the most exciting part of the Rawlsian framework has left the discipline of political science itself in India the poorer for it.