ABSTRACT
This chapter presents women's responses as they elaborate upon and substantiate understandings of themselves as Hindu women who have a legal right to own family land through succession. Through their own words, it highlights women's evaluations of their claim to land, their conceptualization and understandings of their role as peasants, perceptions of their work and contribution to agriculture and their perceived claim to land. It explores the understandings which women themselves have of their rights, both societal and legal. The chapter also includes women's own assessment of their contribution to the family both through work on the land and other duties performed in the household, to determine, if any, the correlation that is made by them between work done and a claim to land ownership. The operation of gender biased ideology locates the women of my sample within a matrix where the individual self is minimized.
