A decolonial perspective
Decolonial, gender, land rights, intersectionality, positive peace, India
In India, land rights continue to be structured according to colonial systems of tenancy and ownership, which ensures the persistence of discrimination against women. Through the lens of structural violence and positive peace (Galtung, ), this entry discusses the central importance of the decolonisation of land rights in the creation of sustainable peace. Using India’s Gujarat-based Working Group for Women and Land Ownership (WGWLO) as a case study, the analysis demonstrates how achieving positive peace requires a transformation of fundamental power relations through economic justice, social transformation and institutional change.1Thank you in particular to Maya Didoss for working on the illustrations.
“May the peace be like a feather… Beautiful, soft and resistant.”
The artwork was provided by (Un)Stiching gazes. The group is an interdisciplinary collective of reflection, research and praxis, which tells and collects stories of peace and encounters in Colombia, especially after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement. They do so through textile narrative, that is to say through threads, needles and fabrics.
Saloni Lakhia (she/her) is an independent researcher and Rotary Peace Fellow with an academic background in law and peace & conflict studies.
ABSTRACT
Galtung’s () conceptualisation of structural violence, defined as the systemic ways in which social-economic systems, cultural and environmental conditions limit, harm and/or disadvantage individuals, is used as a framework to understand how the denial of land rights to women represents a form of institutionalised violence. Discriminatory inheritance practices, limited access to resources, and exclusion from decision-making processes are some of the forms of structural violence faced by women (Agarwal, ). Following Galtung (), these practices are a barrier to positive peace, which Galtung defines in terms of sustainable investments, societal attitudes, and the absence of structural violence.
This entry argues that the decolonisation of land rights is a fundamental component of confronting structural violence and building sustainable peace in postcolonial societies. The entry suggests that women2While feminised individuals (e.g. hijras) were also victims of colonial rule, experiencing land dispossession and land-related injustice among other things, their distinct historical and social dynamic merits separate attention and will not be addressed in this entry. See later footnote for relevant scholarly resources., who have historically been oppressed by colonial and patriarchal structures, have not been able to completely break free from these constraints, and still face the denial of rights to an asset – i.e. land – that could provide social, economic and physical security. This is further exacerbated by a disconnect between laws and women’s lived experiences as documented by the Working Group for Women and Land Ownership (WGWLO), a community organisation based in the Indian state of Gujarat. Apart from the complex network of socio-cultural factors, land titles further complicate the situation of land ownership in India, since the majority of women receive ‘access’ to land, i.e. the right to use it, but not ‘ownership’ of it, which would entail the ability to sell and have overall control of the use and benefits of land resources.
The entry begins by introducing the nexus between colonial legacies and contemporary peace processes with regard to land rights, followed by an exploration of the contemporary impact of colonial era laws. This will lead to an examination of the question of how land rights can be a pathway to peacebuilding. By showing how reforming land rights can positively address gender-based violence in both its immediate and structural forms, this analysis attempts to contribute to the larger academic discourse on feminist theory and policy making.
INTRODUCTION
The systems established by the British colonial rulers in India created artificial divisions through selective interpretation of religious texts, including the Hindu shastras3The shastras are a collection of Hindu texts, treatises and manuals that cover a wide range of subjects, including religion, ethics and law. (Mani, ; Derrett, ; Cohn, ). This colonial legal framework not only reinforced patriarchal control over land, but also established precedents that continue to influence modern legal systems in India today. It is therefore crucial for contemporary peace processes to take account of these critical historical frameworks, since divisions based on religion were created in the context of colonial interventions, and despite independent India’s constitutional commitment to secularism and equality, patriarchal systems continue to perpetuate structural violence today through the exclusion of women’s right to land (Bhattacharya-Panda, ).
The critical nexus between colonial legacies and contemporary peace processes is well represented by the challenge of land rights. Agarwal () depicts how colonial legal frameworks continue to restrict women’s right to land in post-colonial contexts, while the work of Unruh and Williams () demonstrates that legal pluralism and institutional complexity, incomplete colonial cadastral systems creating contemporary conflicts, and colonial impositions on customary gender relations in land rights are key pathways linking colonial land administration legacies to current peacebuilding challenges.
In the context of India, the colonial conquest, the selective and reductive referral to pre-colonial texts in the form of the Hindu shastras to establish legal frameworks in a diverse context with complex realities, and the nation’s subsequent historical trajectory have established a particular patriarchal frame. This is not to argue that Indian society was free of structural violence and gender-based inequalities prior to the colonial occupation; rather, the aim is to highlight how the entanglement of pre-existent hierarchies and the colonial administration have shaped a particular postcolonial condition. It is this condition which will be examined by investigating the empirical case of land ownership in Gujarat.
Colonial-era laws and contemporary impact
The British colonial agenda for reform was represented as being beneficial to women, through its civilising mission that would rescue Indian women from barbaric practices (Nair, ). This rationale gave the colonial rulers the moral upper hand over the male Indian elite, a mandate of cultural superiority that could be used to build political hegemony. Indeed, in her seminal work ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ () Gayatri Spivak posits that the mission to civilise was framed as saving brown women from brown men.
Chronology of Indian land laws
Pre-1929: Customary law and limited rights
Primarily governed by diverse customary practices, often patriarchal, with limited formal recognition of women’s land rights.
1929: Hindu Law of Inheritance Act
First legislation granting limited inheritance rights to females, marking a shift towards formal recognition.
1937: Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act
Enhanced inheritance for widows (equal share with sons in some cases), but not full coparcenary rights. Daughters still largely excluded.
1947: Hindu Code Bill (Proposed)
Aimed to abolish Mitakshara coparcenary and grant equal inheritance to daughters, but faced opposition and was shelved.
1950: Indian Constitution
Guaranteed gender equality (Articles 14, 15, 16), laying the foundation for future legal reforms.
1956: Hindu Succession Act
Addressed women’s land ownership but excluded daughters from coparcenary rights, perpetuating the Mitakshara system’s bias.
2005: Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act
Landmark amendment granting daughters equal coparcenary rights with sons, including full ownership of their share.
Figure 1.
The above summary of Indian land laws highlights the limitations faced by women in owning land. This lack of land ownership perpetuates structural violence in contemporary India by:
a) economically marginalising women and feminised subjects4There is a significant body of scholarship exploring the history of feminised subjects during colonial rule; for example, see Hinchy (2019), ‘Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900’; Reddy (2005), ‘With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India’; and Arondekar (2009), ‘For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India’. by limiting access to credit, thereby reducing their ability to generate sustainable income (Deere & León, );
b) affecting food security, since this directly correlates with landlessness. Furthermore, the reduced capacity for subsistence farming forces women to depend, particularly in rural areas, on agricultural wage labour, which brings challenges due to its seasonal and inconsistent nature. This has a further direct impact on women’s access to sustainable sources of income (Borras & Franco, ); and
c) perpetuating gender-based violence, since women without land rights tend to be more vulnerable to domestic violence (Kabeer, ). In the case of India, access to land is present and encouraged because the women of a household are seen as free labour. However, the rightful ownership of land is contentious, and it is here that we find gender-based exclusion.
Additionally, India’s prevailing patriarchal social system, which was validated and cemented through colonial-era laws (Sangari & Vaid, ; Mani, ), inhibits women from even seeking their rightful share through prevailing customs. This creates tension between the encoded law and social practices at the local familial scale. For instance, an unmarried daughter may be pressured to hand over her rights to her brother for the following reasons:
a) A daughter need not have ownership; she is able to access the land until she marries, and that should be accepted as sufficient.
b) A daughter is expected to marry and leave the home. The wedding will not only cost money – which is expected to be completely borne by the bride’s family – but will also involve the additional expense of a dowry, wherein the bride’s family is expected to hand over assets to the bridegroom as a gift in return for marrying their daughter. It may also be argued that the married daughter will receive joint ownership of her husband’s property, which does not usually materialise (Mishra & Suhag, ).
Overall, inheritance laws in India vary by religion, region, and type of property, with land being treated as a special type of property, and they also define shares/rights not just by gender but also by the person’s relationship to the deceased (Agarwal et al., ; Agarwal, ). In Agarwal et al.’s article entitled ‘How Many and Which Women Own Land in India? Inter-gender and intra-gender gaps’ (), the authors note that despite significant advancement towards equality in inheritance laws, women are found to constitute barely 14% of landowners and own only 11% of agricultural land in rural landowning households, averaged across states. Moreover, women are significantly more likely to inherit land as widows than as daughters, highlighting the divergence between the legal strengthening of daughters’ rights and the social legitimacy that widows’ claims continue to enjoy over those of daughters. The figure below shows longitudinal study data for nine Indian states, including Gujarat, the western state that forms the backdrop for the case study in this entry.
Source: Agarwal et al. (2021), How Many and Which Women Own Land in India? Inter-gender and intra-gender gaps.
Region/State | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 |
South | 18.1 | 18.5 | 21.5 | 21.0 | 20.9 | 23.1 |
Andhra Pradesh | 23.1 | 23.3 | 26.6 | 25.7 | 28.9 | 23.5a |
Telangana | – | – | – | – | – | 32.4 |
Karnataka | 10.2 | 11.6 | 14.3 | 14.5 | 14.6 | 14.7 |
West & Central | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.3 | 10.2 | 9.1 | 9.8 |
Maharashtra | 7.8 | 8.9 | 10.3 | 12.4 | 10.7 | 11.2 |
Gujarat | 7.7 | 8.9 | 7.1 | 6.7 | 7.3 | 7.5 |
Madhya Pradesh | 9.1 | 9.5 | 10.6 | 9.1 | 6.6 | 9.1 |
East | – | 8.9 | 10.0 | 10.0 | 11.2 | 11.3 |
Bihar | – | 13.7 | 16.0( | 16.9 | 17.7 | 16.9 |
Jharkhand | – | 9.7 | 9.7 | 9.5 | 12.3 | 11.2 |
Odisha | – | 2.9 | 4.3 | 3.6 | 3.5 | 5.6 |
All regions | 12.3 | 11.7 | 13.1 | 13.3 | 13.8 | 14.2 |
Empirical evidence from Gujarat
The western state of Gujarat has a distinctive pre-colonial economic structure featuring strong mercantile traditions and a complex land revenue system. During the colonial period the region underwent significant transformation, which has had a lasting impact on gender relations and property rights (Mehta, ; Hardiman, ). Historically, Gujarati women, particularly those from merchant communities in pre-colonial Gujarat, held strong positions in family and business compared to women in other parts of India. However, the implementation of land revenue systems and property rights frameworks during colonial rule significantly altered their socio-economic position (Agarwal, ).
More recently, the persistence of colonial legal frameworks alongside evolving customary practices, as highlighted in Sud’s () research, demonstrate how Gujarat’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation have reinforced, rather than dismantled, colonial-era gender inequities in land ownership. This tension between statutory laws and customary practices is particularly evident in issues pertaining to women’s land rights, where a woman’s legal right to own land is often resisted by the traditional social norms (Shah, ).
The work of Velayudhan and the WGWLO () sheds further light on the local situation related to land property and gender in Gujarat. Concretely, the study offers detailed assessments on the impact of marital status and other factors on a woman’s ownership of land in the region. The study was conducted across ten districts within fifteen tehsils (blocks), with random sampling based on the districts and talukas (subdivisions of tehsils) where the member NGOs of the WGWLO had been actively working. From each taluka, one or two villages were selected.
The significant disconnect between the laws and lived experiences of women was clearly documented by the WGWLO, which found that 4,188 men owned land as opposed to only 561 women. Data on the marital status of the women who owned land (see Figure 3) seemed more positive prima facie, with 53% of them being married.
However, further participant interviews revealed that this apparent ownership was on paper only, in order to qualify for government benefits; in fact, the women had no real control or decision-making power. There were cases where women were not even aware that they were in possession of land titles (registered sale deeds). With regard to widows’ rights to own land, in contrast, the general opinions of men, women family members, caste leaders and talatis (government land officers) reflect that there is little dispute about the claims made by widows over land; in fact, in most cases they tend to receive significant support when there is any contestation of their rights (although there were some cases to the contrary).
Aside from the complex network of socio-cultural factors, land titles further complicate land ownership in India, as also reflected in the WGWLO case study. This is because families tend to provide ‘access’ to land, rather than ‘ownership’. Access signifies the right to use the land, whereas ownership confers to the ability to sell the land and have overall control over its use and benefits. Here women often seem to be misled with regard to their rights, as they are given ‘ownership’ without any title, thus allowing access to the land with no decision-making power to control it. This conditional access is locally referred to as ‘informal’ land ownership. This distinction highlights a crucial paradox whereby women’s relationship to land is trapped within the colonial-patriarchal framework, being characterised by rights and rules for women’s land ownership that are viewed more as ‘alleged’ rights than actual rights.
Land rights as a pathway to peacebuilding
Land is central to decolonisation. This is not just about metaphorical or knowledge-based decolonisation (Tuck & Yang, ); rather, land is conceptualised as reflecting a system of reciprocal relations and obligations, connecting political systems and gender relations (Simpson, ). Land rights can thus play the role of a concrete pathway to peacebuilding by transforming direct and structural violence against women at multiple levels.
At the individual, direct level, land ownership provides women with financial security as well as physical safety, both key fundamental components of positive peace. Meanwhile, at the community level women’s land rights strengthen collective economic resilience (Agarwal, ). When women have secure land rights they tend to invest more in community resources, sustainable agricultural practices, and local food security (Agarwal, ).
By owning land a woman not only gains an economic asset, but also has leverage to resist physical violence. For instance, as indicated in the Kerala study carried out by Panda and Agarwal (), matrilineal traditions, particularly in communities such as the Nairs, have historically provided women with greater access to property rights. This has contributed to higher female land ownership, and women who own their homes experience a lower risk of marital violence than women without land ownership. Moreover, land ownership allows women to make autonomous decisions (Deere & Doss, ) and participate in community governing bodies (Agarwal, ). These factors help us to understand how empowerment at the individual level ripples outward, creating broader social equality and peace at the community, local and national levels.
The linkage between land rights, gender and violence is not only an issue in India; it has been observed in other regions too. For instance, the complex relationship between housing, land and property rights, and gender-based violence in Liberia is reflected in field research carried out in Monrovia in 2013 by Richardson and Hughes (). They found that men controlled housing and land, and they used that control over resources to physically control women. If they perceived their power to be threatened or questioned, they sometimes used physical and/or sexual violence as a form of reprisal or control. This Liberian dynamic of gender-based violence is a near-parallel to the colonial control patterns experienced in India, where the formalisation of property rights during colonial rule established male dominance over land and exposed women to a new form of vulnerability (Banerjee et al., ).
These parallel cases, although different in terms of their historical and geographical contexts, both reveal a single crucial insight, i.e. that the relationship between land rights and structural violence is mediated by what Mohanty () terms ‘colonially informed patriarchal structures’, wherein men’s control over land becomes both an instrument of power and a site of violence at the first threat of losing that power.
It is thus critical to address these intersecting forms of structural violence as conceptualised by Galtung (). When combined with access to legal resources, economic opportunities and education, land rights help to create more stable and stronger pathways to peace (Kumar & Quisumbing, ). This will require multi-level interventions to transform these systemic inequities, but this transformation is imperative in the quest to achieve positive peace.
Conclusion
The institutionalisation of traditionally fluid patriarchal structures to formal legal systems has been a significant component of the colonial impact on land rights in India. By interweaving religious and social customs in the codification of land rights and inheritance laws and policies, the colonial administrators reinforced patriarchal control by recognising male authority in property and land-related matters. Flexible customary practices were transformed into rigid legal frameworks, making women’s access to land even more limited and precarious.
The land debate in India has been further complicated by the recent increase in infrastructure development projects, at the national as well as the local level. Special Economic Zones have been created across the country with large-scale highway projects forming part of the industrial corridor (Levien, ), but the payments pertaining to the land acquisition for these projects are made to male household heads, exacerbating the already significant existing inequalities (Agarwal, ).
Post independence, India adopted community development as a way to combat the colonial rulers’ legacy of deprivation, with land at the heart of this. The ravages of colonial rule were felt most keenly by the most vulnerable sections of society – women, feminised individuals, members of lower castes, and impoverished families. The wide discrepancy between the legal provisions and policies and the lived experiences of women today only highlights the continuing impact of the colonial systems, wherein coloniality can still be understood to be operating by maintaining gender hierarchies through the limitation of land rights. In the quest to achieve sustainable peace, these enduring issues emphasise the importance of decolonial approaches in centralising women’s relationship to land.
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“Mainstream […] strategic adaptation narrows the attention of researchers and practitioners to managing future risks and immediate problem-solving solutions, with limited potential for the holistic transformation required for political and social change.”
How to cite this entry:
Lakhia, S. 2025: “Women’s Land Rights as a Pathway to Positive Peace: A decolonial pespective.” Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. 20.03.2025. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/womens-land-rights/.
Roundtable
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