“Women’s Rights in India: A Feminist Perspective†is a philosophically argued feminist critique on the rights of women in India. The book argues that while the Indian woman of the Vedic times was not an absolutely liberated woman, she still enjoyed considerable freedom, dignity and opportunities. Unfortunately, in the later times woman’s position in India progressively deteriorated and when the British came to rule the country she was considered to be a weak and frail creature who lived in the shadow of her husband and who had no identity except as the faithful, enduring, meek wife of a man. The author looks at this ‘progressive deterioration of woman’s status in India’ as a deliberate male agenda drawn from the socio-political arrangement of patriarchy, which used culture and religion as its finest ploy to subjugate women. This feminist perspective is not complete without showing the path ahead. The author argues for preferential treatment of women and protective discrimination in order to bridge the gap created by centuries of systematic inequality and for a rights-based approach to the problems of women’s equality in India, besides pleading for a radical change in mindset, both of men and women, about women’s rights and the protection of these rights through carefully planned laws and their enforcement through a functionally accessible and equitable judicial system.
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