ABSTRACT
South Asia, an extremely diverse region with a range of religious faiths including Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh, is also recognized as a “patriarch belt” (Caldwell, 1982) where women are subordinated to men in kin-ordered social structure. These societies are ordered by a powerful ideology of female subordination, composed mainly of patrilineal-patrilocal families, with control of land, capital, and the female labor process firmly in male hands (Bardhan, 1986).
