Land is a crucial form of property in the developing world. Inheritance shares in land, based significantly on customs specific to religious or ethnic group or region, are deeply unequal across genders. Many such group customs are recognized by a form of multiculturalism applied to about a third of the world’s population, laws specific to religious or ethnic groups that govern family life. Rachel Brulé’s book addresses the enduring political question of how disadvantaged groups may challenge systems of dominance with specific reference to gendered rights to inherit land in India, the largest country with group-specific personal laws. It examines the conditions under which the personal laws applied to India’s Hindu majority were changed and those when women gained effective access to land. This is crucial to Indian women, only 13 percent of whom own land although three-fourths of them base their income on agriculture (p. 4).

Hindu women’s inheritance rights were legislatively increased soon after independence, and further enhanced in some states from the 1970s to the 1990s and nationally in 2005. The national legislation of 2005 made daughters co-heirs by birth in the property jointly owned by a Hindu family including agricultural land, thereby giving daughters and sons equal rights in such property including the right to claim partitioned shares. As inheritance rights are the most consequential feature of family law for gender relations, proposals to change them aroused particularly strong opposition, limited legislative reform most in this area of personal law in the 1950s, and restricted judicial changes thereafter. Brulé explores what enabled women’s inheritance rights to be enhanced since the 1970s and the mixed effects this had on women’s access to property and power. She underlines that the quotas for women’s representation in local government introduced nationally in 1993 and in some states earlier, crucially influenced women’s gains from the succession reforms despite local governments’ limited resources.

Brulé demonstrates that the representative quotas particularly benefited women who entered the marriage market after the inheritance reforms and the application of the women’s quota in their village. As the resistance of male and sometimes older female kin to women’s control over family land was strong, women were most likely to benefit from their increased property entitlement if women local government representatives helped them broker bargains within their nuclear families, whereby they exchanged their dowries for shares in their natal family’s land. Such “integrative bargains,” as Brulé calls them, reduced natal kin resistance to women gaining shares in their families’ land. Women who married before both the inheritance reform and the application of the representative quota in their village typically obtained only token shares of their family land whether the inheritance occurred before or after these reforms. If they violated customary marital choice, they were more likely to experience violence from natal kin acutely aware of their eroding authority.

Brulé’s analysis valuably highlights the conditions under which women representatives become gatekeepers who help overcome strong resistance from kinsfolk, bureaucrats, and politicians to women’s property access; make women ongoing contributors to natal family welfare; reduce female infanticide and sex-selective abortion; and thus reshape the family. She addresses the determinants of reform implementation better than the earlier extensive literature on Indian personal law and suggests ways in which changes in gendered property rights may be understood globally. However, the book does not attend fully to an important aspect of India’s succession reforms of the 1950s and since the 1970s that helped natal kin limit women’s benefits: the restriction of the changes—contrary to the demands of women’s organizations—to intestate inheritance, which aided their legislative passage while rendering them circumventable through wills.

The growing scholarly attention to intracountry variation is particularly relevant in a country of India’s size and diversity. Brulé shows that social status is valued more in inegalitarian settings, increasing the value families place on status retention and status gains by limiting women’s access to family land. She might have in addition addressed why inheritance reforms were passed initially in certain southern and west-central states one to three decades before similar national legislation. Bina Agarwal, an important agent of twenty-first-century reform, earlier explored how kinship practices influence women’s property shares in A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (1994). The initial inheritance reforms happened in some regions where the predominance of bilateral and matrilineal customs, and village and kin endogamy weakened resistance. Reform initiatives were weak in the largely matrilineal parts of northeastern India where the customary laws applied to many residents already recognized these practices. The early reforms occurred in southern India, where the predominant bilateral and matrilineal customs gave women greater influence in their natal families both before and after marriage. Brulé could have explored whether this also lowered barriers to reform implementation, in interaction with women’s representation, a finding that would be compatible with her framing argument that both social norms and political institutions influence the prospects of mutually beneficial intrafamily bargains.

The book indicates that women mobilized far less for inheritance reform than for representative quotas, reducing the incentives to introduce robust enforcement mechanisms. But it doesn’t identify why some parties nevertheless changed these laws and why the effects varied on partisanship. The reforms consolidated women’s support for the party that adopted them in Andhra Pradesh alone (for the Telugu Desam Party), but they didn’t prevent its erosion in Karnataka or Maharashtra (for the Congress Party), help advance it in Tamil Nadu (for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) or prevent in Kerala the growth of the main opposition party (the Communist Party of India–Marxist). The early introduction of women’s representative quotas and an increase in party competition around the same time in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka before the inheritance reforms, Brulé’s central arguments suggest, are likely to have increased women’s gains from their increased inheritance rights.

In Kerala where legislation first entitled women to shares in lineage property in 1976, Brulé identified younger men in matrilineages as its sole agents and beneficiaries. Although women’s legislative representation was then very low, the vibrancy of women’s associations contributed to the reform. Contrary to the author’s claim, the legislation didn’t transfer inheritance rights from matrilineages to patrilineal nuclear families. It was only in the minority of Keralan families governed by patrilineal Mitakshara law that ancestral property was divided among male kin alone. Matrilineal inheritance systems governed most of the state’s families, whose joint property the reform required be divided equally among all family members, a distinction courts recognized, for example, in C.T. Radhakrishnan v. C.T. Viswanathan Nair (2006). The passage of this reform almost two decades before women gained local government quotas probably initially limited women’s gains, which are, however, likely to have increased once they gained quotas in 1993. This might provide a clue to why Kerala remained the state where indicators of women’s well-being are highest.

Notwithstanding these minor problems, this book offers a conceptually nuanced and methodologically innovative analysis of gendered land rights. It thereby adds a new dimension to understandings of the determinants of the quality of democracy in India, and potentially elsewhere too.