The second All India Legal History Congress held in 2021 was themed ‘Pursuit of Legal History of India in the 21st Century’. It featured many eminent historians from different parts of India and the world and covered all periods of Indian history. Among the panels was one in which teachers of law drawn from different Indian universities spoke on the ‘history of women and law’. Many of them prefaced their talks by invoking the glorious, and high, position of women in ancient India, particularly during the Vedic period.

Why does the mythical (high) position of the Aryan (Vedic) woman continue to exert such a powerful hold on not only popular understandings of history but even academic enquiries, despite much feminist argument to the contrary? This book provides historically grounded reasons why the invocation of a glorious Indian past became an imperative for Orientalist and anti-colonial nationalist thinkers alike, in the 19th and 20th centuries, though it did not enchant women in quite the same way. It provides, through a detailed discussion of not just the debates and discourses but also public campaigns, case law and judicial reasoning, a far more complex and nuanced understanding of the law, critically evaluating what the Orientalists and nationalists said about law and women over the last two hundred years. The myth of a ‘glorious ancient Indian past’ and the place of women in it has received redoubled force with the recent rise to state power of the Hindu right under the leadership of the BJP. Such a focus on ancient India, ironically, draws a great deal more from the colonial constructions of Indian history than is usually admitted.

The book provides students with empirically grounded and historically reasoned ways of thinking about the past, drawing on more than four decades of feminist and other scholarship. How does this past animate legal discussions up to the present day? And how has the feminist lens challenged or transformed this understanding? We now know that both state law and custom offered ambiguous opportunities and freedoms, and could have the effect of undermining (some) women's status, in the name of either uniformity or patriarchal normativity.