Adivasi Women and the Equality Quest/ion – Revisited

Editor’s Note: This piece revisits critical arguments raised in a piece last year on women’s day, and addresses a crucial jurisprudential development over the year that followed.

IN A PREVIOUS PIECE,, I had opened the question of equality for women belonging to Adivasi and other traditional forest dwelling communities. That piece noted that this quest for equality by women had been most prominently seen in matters of inheritance rights to land and property. And also how this question is pitched to fit the framework set for women from dominant communities, with no regard to Adivasi women' s unique sense of identity, or the social, economic and emotive connect with their communities and the lands they occupy. Over the years, courts have generated a jurisprudence under which Adivasi women have been compelled to deny their indigenous identity by demonstrating their proximity to Hindu culture. Assuming that customary laws governing tribal communities would be necessarily discriminatory, the courts have, in a number of cases, tried to address the question by circumventing the exemption clause under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956.*

While Section 2(2) of the 1956 Act excludes women from tribal communities from its purview, courts developed an extraordinary mechanism to convert that express exclusion to inclusion of a unique kind. If the women could prove that their community was sufficiently Hinduised or sufficiently Hindu-like, they could receive the benefit of the 1956 Act, despite an express provision to the contrary. 

Several tests were developed to evaluate sufficient Hinduisation, wherein it could be shown that the communities practiced Hindu customs** — but the method was as arbitrary as it was unrealistic. In this quest, Adivasi women have had to choose between their individuated desire to be equal with others in their community, and their other tribal identity which originates from the same communal-social pool. To gain one, they have had to lose the other, and in this process, suffer the blame of dishonour and relinquish a complete sense of self. 

An unexplored route in the quest for equality

I discussed the dangers of this enterprise in the previous piece. The need to write a follow-up to it arose in July last year when the Supreme Court took a stand different from its earlier — liberal and reformist disposition — which generated the jurisprudence of choice. Speaking through Justice Sanjay Karol, in Ram Charan v. Sukhram (2025)  the Court has embarked a break from the previous line of reasoning, moving towards an alternative wherein a Constitutional route for the quest for equality can be carved. This piece will traverse that line of argument to understand how, instead of forcing Adivasi women to pick one aspect of their identity over another, it is possible to synthesise a Constitutional rationality to which they were always entitled. 

The woman, in this case, had to wait for three decades to receive her fair share of the ancestral property. In this struggle, she was also made to believe that she had to choose her individual right over her tribal identity, something she was unwilling to do. After an interminable wait, the Court finally decided that it was not prudent for the law to compel her to make that choice.