Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
More than one student of India, confronted by the variety of its regional languages and cultures, has compared the subcontinent, in this respect, to the whole of Europe.
(Bhatt 1980: 43)A description can give but a generalized picture of a type of social conduct which is ever changing and it is necessary to understand the variety and mode of the changes which are found in each … region … to understand well the implications of a social structure.
(Karve 1965: 378)Woven through the discussion so far has been the argument that there are marked geographic variations in the incidence and strength of factors which affect women's ability to claim and control land. Here I will seek to systematically examine these variations, drawing upon a number of crossregional tables and maps that I have constructed. This is meant to provide a broad regional gradation of the degree of difficulty women are likely to face in realizing their inheritance claims in arable land and in exercising control over its management. In addition, the cross-regional presentation is meant to serve two purposes: one, to make the general point that there is a marked diversity in women's situation across South Asia, and so to contradict the excessive generalizations about the status of South Asian women that proliferate in the literature; and two, to share with other scholars my ethnographic information base which they could draw upon and perhaps use to answer questions not addressed in this book.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.