Sikkimese Women's Differentiated Citizenship: Postcoloniality, Indigeneity, and Gender in India

This project examines how postcolonial regulations and practices of citizenship operate among the Sikkimese in Northeast India along the axes of gender and indigeneity, and how they are experienced by Sikkimese women. The study combines the postcolonial legacy of indirect rule, that is, the use of customary law by colonial powers as a means of ruling colonised populations, with indigenous feminist perspectives on citizenship to examine how such legacies are brought to bear on the lives of Sikkimese women today. It focuses specifically on patrilineal citizenship laws that curtail the rights of women to pass on their Sikkimese subjecthood, and by extension immovable property, to their children if they marry outside their indigenous group. Alongside a critical analysis of legal documents on the patrilineal rules of transmission for Sikkimese subjecthood, and interviews with lawyers and policymakers, the research gives voice to Sikkimese women to understand how they experience and negotiate their differentiated citizenship through the institution of marriage. By doing so, the research produces new knowledge not only about the challenges towards legal equality between women
and men in Sikkim, and the complex relationships between gender and indigeneity in India, but also more broadly it offers a new perspective to feminist knowledge by theorising and analysing indigeneity, rights and citizenship in postcolonial societies in the global south.