Why Adivasi women are fighting for their property rights

Bitiya Murmu’s father died around 1980, when she was just a year-and-a-half old.

As the family members grieved their loss, they did not realise that for the next two decades, their lives would be shaped by the event. Her father had been the headman of their village, in present-day Jharkhand’s Dumka district, and he had owned significant amounts of land. But under the customary laws of the Santal Adivasi community, to which the family belongs, her widowed mother did not have any rights over the land.

Murmu’s uncles wrested control of the land from her mother, leaving her and her three daughters at the mercy of her extended marital family. “My mother was subjected to grave mental torture by her in-laws, but she stayed put in my father’s house because she had nowhere else to go,” Murmu said. “With three daughters, she couldn’t return to her natal family as nobody would take her in there. She tried getting the local police and gram sabha involved, but nobody came to our help.”

The question of land inheritance rights of Adivasi women is a fraught one.

The Indian Succession Act of 1925 governs matters of inheritance for Christian and Parsi communities, while the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, applies to Hindu,...

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