ABSTRACT
The fascinatingly diverse sources of family studies, ranging from religious tracts, printed domestic manuals from the nineteenth century, ethnography of kinship systems, literary texts, pamphlets, autobiographies, to archival records of legislations and adjudications, unveil the complexity in discourses of family and marriage. However, the imposition of family values on workers’ families began when the labour lines came to be viewed as source of future labour and women’s reproductive labour became valuable for the management. Feminist lawyers and commentators on legal theory have discussed the crucial role of the state in supervising laws regarding marriage, especially child marriage, divorce and, more recently, domestic violence. Integrating articulations of difference will require the Indian women’s movement to redraw the intimate spaces of struggle and the process may be messy; but fighting against the multi-pronged structure of prejudice was never supposed to be easy.
