Religion’s Role in Reinforcing Patriarchal Norms in India

In India, religion is not just a private matter of faith – it actively shapes who holds power, who is protected, and who is controlled. For millions of women across the country, religious institutions and the laws derived from them have functioned not only as spiritual frameworks but as systems that define their social position, restrict their legal rights, and, in extreme cases, place their bodies at the center of communal conflict. Understanding how religion reinforces patriarchy in India requires looking at three intersecting realities: the use of religious ideology to justify male authority, the role of religion-based personal laws in limiting women’s rights, and the way patriarchal norms operate – with some variation – across all of India’s major religions.

Religion as a tool for patriarchal control 🔗

Men have historically dominated as the recipients, interpreters, and transmitters of religious messages, while women have largely remained passive receivers of teachings and ardent practitioners of religious rituals. This asymmetry is not accidental. Religious frameworks in India have long been used to assign women specific roles – as wives, mothers, daughters – and to enforce those roles through cultural norms presented as divine prescription.

In Hinduism, the most influential ancient text governing social conduct is the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu). The Manusmriti depicts women in a very poor light and advocates total control of women by the men in their lives. Its prescriptions tie a woman’s dharma (duty) to her relationship with men – as a daughter under her father, as a wife under her husband, as a widow under her son. Feminist historians such as Uma Chakravarti have criticized the Manusmriti’s conceptualization of women through its treatment of marriage and family, and scholars have argued that following its codes made women more helpless and marginalized compared to the earlier Vedic period.

The key mechanism at work here is not just the text itself but how it is used. Right-wing political formations have consistently deployed women’s bodies, images, and representations to delineate community boundaries and reinforce a patriarchal domesticity framed in religious terms. In this way, religious ideology functions as a political instrument: women’s “purity,” “honour,” and conformity to prescribed roles become markers of community identity, making control over women a matter of collective religious interest rather than individual injustice.

Usha Rani Vongur, a Marxist feminist scholar, has pointed out that religion controls thought, distorts reality, and obstructs questioning. This captures a deeper problem: when patriarchal norms are embedded in sacred texts and ritual practices, women who challenge those norms are not just breaking social rules – they appear to be acting against the divine order itself. That makes resistance harder and internal reform slower.

Women’s bodies as symbols of religious and national honour 🔗

Patriarchal control through religion takes a particularly dangerous form when women’s bodies become symbols of community honour. Research on the 1947 Partition shows how women from Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities were targeted specifically because they were viewed as symbols representing their religious communities, with violence against them understood as a way to “feminise” and humiliate the men of the opposing community.

This logic has not disappeared. In Hindu nationalist discourse, women enter the political landscape both as passive symbols of the nation and as active participants in the role of warrior-wife-mother – with the “nation as woman” conceit meaning that attacks on women’s bodies are construed as attacks on national honour. The result is a framework where protecting women becomes inseparable from asserting religious and ethnic dominance over rival communities, rather than about women’s actual rights or safety.

The impact of religious personal laws on women’s rights 🔗

India’s legal system does not apply a single, uniform family law to all citizens. Instead, the personal laws of various religions in India – Hindu, Muslim, and Christian – often contain provisions that discriminate against women, governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship according to the religious identity of the individual. The Indian Constitution guarantees equality under Articles 14 and 15, yet various personal laws governing Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Parsi communities often reflect patriarchal norms, adversely impacting women’s rights in marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship.

A critical dimension of this problem is who holds interpretive authority. Within Muslim communities in India, legislative power over personal law was granted to the Ulema – the all-male conservative religious clerics – meaning that by conceding power to patriarchal leaders of private groups without engaging the diversity of views within those communities, the state effectively endorsed a system that sidelines women’s voices.

The Shah Bano case and triple talaq 🔗

No single legal episode better illustrates the tension between religious personal law and gender justice than the debate over triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) – the practice under some interpretations of Muslim personal law whereby a husband could instantly and irrevocably divorce his wife by pronouncing “talaq” three times. This practice was widely criticized for making Muslim women vulnerable to threats of instant divorce and resulting destitution, with no legal recourse or period for reconciliation.

The landmark Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017) case brought this issue to a head. Shayara Bano, a Muslim woman who had endured abuse and dowry harassment, was divorced by her husband through triple talaq in 2015. She challenged the constitutionality of the practice before the Supreme Court, arguing it violated her fundamental rights to equality and dignity. In 2017, the Supreme Court struck down triple talaq as unconstitutional, leading to the enactment of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, which criminalized instant divorce.

However, feminist legal scholarship has noted that even within this landmark judgment, the gender aspect fell short – the Court seemed less concerned with women’s rights per se and more focused on the preservation of marriage, finding fault with triple talaq primarily because the marital tie could be broken capriciously without attempts at reconciliation. The ruling was historic, but it also illustrated how deeply political the question of personal law reform remains – with the Hindu nationalist government’s legislative response accused of selectively targeting Muslim men while ignoring parallel inequalities in other personal laws.

Hindu personal law: reform and remaining gaps 🔗

Hindu personal law has undergone significant formal reform since independence, but gaps remain. Under Hindu personal law, the Hindu Succession Act grants women complete ownership of their stridhan (personal property gifted to them, typically at marriage), but this provision does not extend to the assets of her spouse, limiting her financial security within the marriage. Prior to the Hindu Succession Amendment Act of 2005, daughters had no equal right to ancestral property.

An important feminist critique, raised by scholar Nivedita Menon, points out that Hindu personal laws were selectively codified during colonial times based on North Indian, upper-caste practices – eliminating a vast spectrum of more liberal customary laws that existed across the country. In other words, the “Hindu” personal law that exists today is not a neutral preservation of tradition but a politically constructed version of it.

The Uniform Civil Code debate 🔗

A Uniform Civil Code (UCC) – a single set of family laws applicable to all citizens regardless of religion – has been proposed as a solution to this patchwork of discriminatory personal laws. The UCC aims to establish common laws governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, and property, prohibiting practices like polygamy, nikah halala, and iddat, and focusing on gender equality across communities.

However, the UCC carries significant political complications. Women’s groups like the All India Women’s Democratic Association (AIDWA) were wary of the Uniform Civil Code, seeing it as more of a tool in the hands of political parties than a genuine advancement for women’s rights – particularly when the Hindu Right proposed modelling it on Hindu personal laws presented as the neutral standard. Women’s rights lawyer Flavia Agnes has emphasized that what is needed is “equality of rights, not equality of law” – a distinction that recognizes the political manipulation of gender justice for communal ends.

Gender inequality across India’s religions 🔗

While public debate often focuses on Islam when discussing personal law and patriarchy, gender inequality within religious frameworks is not confined to any one community. Although the personal laws of all religious communities are regarded as problematic from a gendered point of view, the general discourse has disproportionately focused on Muslim personal law. A more complete picture requires examining how patriarchal structures operate across all religious traditions in India.

Hinduism and the policing of women’s access 🔗

In Hinduism, patriarchal control is expressed not only through family law but also through women’s access to sacred spaces. The Sabarimala temple controversy is a defining example. Women and girls of reproductive age were traditionally not permitted to worship at the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, based on the belief that the deity Lord Ayyappa was celibate. The Kerala High Court upheld this practice in 1991, legally barring women between the ages of 10 and 50 from entering the temple.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 4:1 verdict that restricting the entry of women of menstruating age was unconstitutional, stating that devotion cannot be subjected to discrimination and that patriarchal notions cannot be allowed to override equality in worship. Yet the ruling met with mass protests, and despite the Supreme Court pronouncing the ban unconstitutional, there has been little on-the-ground change, with the institutionalised power of priests and the belief that customs cannot be changed through judicial processes continuing to stand in the way of equality.

The Sabarimala controversy also revealed the deeply political nature of such disputes. Feminist legal advocacy in India has found that challenges to gender inequality in religious spaces can be appropriated by the Hindu Right to pursue its own agenda, provoking backlash rather than reform. Women’s entry as a rights issue can become instrumentalised in communal politics, complicating what should be a straightforward matter of equality.

Islam and the double burden on Muslim women 🔗

Muslim women in India face a distinctive challenge: they are subject both to the patriarchal restrictions imposed by their own community and to the violence and discrimination perpetrated by Hindu nationalist movements targeting them as members of a minority community.

Within Muslim personal law, polygamy is a contentious issue, representing how patriarchal interpretation can prevail and dominate – with the Quranic sanction for up to four wives often divorced from its explicit condition of equal and just treatment of all wives. Muslim women in India have demanded legal redress for polygamy, child marriage, purdah, and denial of property rights – and the political arena for Muslims has been overwhelmingly male-dominated, with the Ulama criticized for supporting a patriarchal interpretation of the Quran to further their own agendas.

At the same time, it is important to resist oversimplification. As feminist scholar Nivedita Menon has noted, Muslim personal laws have in some respects afforded better protection to women through inheritance laws and the right of mehr (mandatory gift to a wife at marriage) than comparable Hindu personal law provisions. Muslim women’s organizations in India regard themselves as part of the national women’s movement and draw on a transnational discourse of Islamic feminism that argues the Quran guarantees women rights routinely denied in practice due to patriarchal interpretations of Islamic law.

Christianity and Dalit communities 🔗

Christianity in India is no exception to the pattern of religious patriarchy. Theologian Shalini Mulackal has observed that women have internalized patriarchal Christianity – becoming comfortable with the limited space given to them – with language, symbols, and culturally conditioned interpretations of scripture evolving into practices that alienate women and even influence exploitation and violence toward them.

For Dalit women – who sit at the intersection of caste, religion, and gender – the burden is compounded. Brahmanical patriarchy, deeply rooted in ancient Hindu texts like the Manusmriti, prescribes rigid gender roles and subordinated status for women particularly from lower castes – with the idea that women belong to men from birth to death reflecting the deep entanglement of caste and patriarchal religion. Whether Dalit women convert to Christianity or Buddhism to escape caste-based discrimination, patriarchal norms often follow them into their new religious communities.

Sikh and tribal communities 🔗

Sikh culture is generally regarded as more gender-neutral in its scriptural foundations – the Guru Granth Sahib does not endorse caste hierarchy or the subordination of women – yet patriarchal social practices persist within Sikh communities in India. Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain communities in India follow Hindu personal law because they do not have separate codified personal laws, which means they are governed by a framework that carries the patriarchal assumptions built into Hindu law.

Several tribal and regional communities in India do exhibit matriarchal tendencies – among the Nairs of Kerala and the Khasis of Meghalaya, for instance, inheritance passes through the female line and women hold significant social authority. These communities demonstrate that patriarchy is not an inevitable feature of Indian religious or cultural life, even if it is pervasive.

Religion, politics, and women’s bodies in communal violence 🔗

The intersection of religion and patriarchy becomes most acute – and most violent – in communal conflicts. Across India’s history of Hindu-Muslim violence, women’s bodies have consistently been used as sites of communal aggression. Acts of rape during communal conflicts were aimed at both physically and figuratively damaging the integrity of women’s bodies by appropriating their reproductive powers – with sexual violence functioning as the “gendering and sexualising of inter-male relations of domination.”

Political scientist Zoya Hasan has argued that the new politics of community identity in contemporary India serves as a convenient vehicle for strengthening patriarchal control over female sexuality – with upper-caste Hindu women positioned as victims of the Muslim “Other” and as custodians of national honour. This framing simultaneously limits women’s autonomy and justifies communal aggression in their name.

The broader takeaway is that religious patriarchy in India does not operate in isolation from politics. As the national consultation organized by Streevani (Voice of Women) found, in India, where politics uses religion as a tool to manipulate the masses, women bear the brunt of the consequences – facing violence in the family, in their communities, and in public spaces, often at the hands of those they are taught to revere.

Reform, resistance, and the path forward 🔗

Despite these structural challenges, women across religious communities in India have consistently organized to challenge patriarchal religious norms. Groups like the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, which played a central role in the Shayara Bano litigation, and the All India Women’s Democratic Association (AIDWA) have pushed for reforms to personal laws while remaining critical of political manipulation of those reforms. Hindu feminist organizations have worked to reclaim religious spaces and reinterpret texts to highlight egalitarian traditions within Hinduism.

The judiciary has played a critical role. Landmark judicial interventions such as the Shayara Bano and Sabarimala cases highlight the judiciary’s crucial role in promoting gender equality within religious legal frameworks. But feminist legal scholarship remains as important as ever in pointing out the shortcomings of these judgments and pushing for a more thorough constitutional engagement with the intersection of gender, religious identity, and equality.

True reform requires more than court rulings. It demands that religious institutions themselves reckon with how their interpretations of scripture have served to entrench male authority – and that the state stop treating personal law as a politically convenient space where the rights of women can be traded against the management of communal identities.

What do you think? If religious personal laws are meant to reflect the values of each community, why are the voices of women within those communities so often sidelined in debates about reforming them? And should a secular state like India maintain separate religion-based personal laws at all, or does doing so inevitably compromise the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment for every citizen?

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