ABSTRACT
Engaging with the legal centralist paradigm, legal feminists of the first three waves have only been able to capture a partial picture of women’s experience of laws. Historically excluded from the mainstream knowledge creation processes, feminists have raised the epistemological question of women’s experiences and the subjugated nature of their knowledge. Feminist epistemology critiques ‘objective’ knowledge, which is situated outside the knower, reflecting an independent external world to be tested and validated and universal in nature. Since the 1970s, feminist legal theories have contributed significantly towards promoting the feminist agenda by engaging with the question of women’s experiences of law. Women’s positions in a religious minority community in a postcolonial context such as South Asia demonstrate the complexity of legal pluralism. Legal pluralism in this region took the shape because of encounters with colonial legal systems between the 18th and the 20th century.
