The Ram Charan vs. Sukhram Supreme Court ruling of July 17, 2025 affirms equal inheritance rights for tribal women. The judgment advances gender justice and this in itself is very welcome.

Yet its reasoning is striking: it invokes the absence of a codified customary law within the Gond community and proceeds to adjudicate the matter on the basis of “justice, equity and good conscience.” The court observes, “However, customs too, like the law, cannot remain stuck in time and others cannot be allowed to take refuge in customs or hide behind them to deprive others of their right.” 

Scholars have long argued that the category of custom has emerged through histories of state-making and is therefore deeply entangled with the state, politics, and markets. In the Indian context, when a customary practice denies women their rights, it must be situated within a broader structure in which tribal women are increasingly being victimised, dispossessed, and cast as civilisationally inferior in a society shaped by caste and patriarchy.

Isolating custom and panchayat leaders as relics of the past – unchanging and solely responsible for the oppression of tribal women – obscures a more nuanced approach to custom, one that takes into account the negotiations between tribal men, tribal women, and 'high' caste men in the context of violent histories of state-making. Moreover, research has shown that the principle of “justice, equity and good conscience” has often served as a euphemism for colonial discretion, legitimising racialised governance, legal exceptionalism, and imperial violence.

What does it mean, then, for the postcolonial legal apparatus to invoke this principle in the contemporary moment?

I take this ruling as a point of departure to examine the uneasy and often fraught relationship between customary law and gender justice. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival research among Bhils and Girassias in the Udaipur district of southern Rajasthan, I focus on three key moments to explore a central question: why do tribal men turn against tribal women in the name of custom?

Colonial fratricide

In the colonial period, in the princely state of Mewar in southern Rajasthan, the British and the native ruler jointly established the Mewar Bhil Corps (MBC) to subdue what they perceived as recalcitrant and “wild” Bhils and bring them under the control of the Mewar state.

The MBC was an experiment in colonial social engineering, shaped by racialised and civilisational distinctions between caste and tribe – distinctions rooted in colonial ethnography and a broader imperial discourse that associated tribal identities with primitivity, animality, and an innate propensity for violence. The British believed that Bhils could be “civilised” through military discipline, especially by serving alongside high-caste, non-tribal soldiers in the MBC. This supposed upliftment, they imagined, would suffice to compel Bhils to kill their own.

Colonial archives frequently describe Bhils as “wild,” “savage,” and “primitive” – terms that reveal what cultural theorist Paul Gilroy has called infrahumanism, the racialised logic that renders certain groups less than fully human. Infrahuman ideologies shaped the role of Bhil soldiers in the MBC, who were ordered to suppress – and, if necessary, kill – their kin and neighbours, the so-called “wild Bhils.”

In the Kotra and Kherwara cantonments, fratricidal violence became routine, with MBC soldiers instructed to open fire at the slightest sign of insubordination. As Hannah Arendt observed, colonised “savages” were imagined to lack fully human qualities, such that Europeans could massacre them without recognising the act as murder. In these frontier zones, Bhils were made to kill their own in the name of suppressing what the colonial state had itself constructed as savagery.

Amid overlapping and contested sovereignties, the British commander of the MBC also convened panchayats to adjudicate disputes among tribals, thereby asserting jurisdiction in competition with the native rulers of Mewar. In this context, a form of customary law emerged – not as a residue of tradition, but as a product of colonial violence and bureaucratic state-making.

Naming

Despite the immense violence inflicted by the MBC during the colonial period – both in its formation and in its operations to suppress insurrection – the disbandment of the MBC in Kotra in 1951 is still remembered with a sense of loss.

This mourning is shaped in part by a contrast with the neighboring cantonment of Kherwara, where the MBC was reconstituted as a police force. The continued institutional presence in Kherwara brought employment, infrastructural investment, and a degree of prosperity. In Kotra, by contrast, many tribals and non-tribals feel they were left behind.

Yet the upward mobility experienced by Bhils in Kherwara has often required a disavowal of Bhil identity itself. Those who achieve social and economic advancement frequently adopt the name “Meena,” distancing themselves from the figure of the “wild Bhil” and aligning with more socially accepted narratives of progress and modernity.

Among the two dominant Scheduled Tribe (ST) groups in Rajasthan, Meenas and Bhils, the Meenas have been far more successful in leveraging the benefits of ST reservations, attaining economic prosperity, legal acumen, and political representation. The name “Meena” becomes a pathway into state-recognised modernity.

This brief foray into history and political economy reveals how the promise of progress for Bhils is a juggernaut that demands the sacrifice of what is most intimate: the killing of one’s own and the relinquishing of one’s name. It is against this backdrop that the complexities of customary law and gender justice must be understood today.

Betrayal

A historical reading of customary law in India reveals that tribal women have often had more room for negotiation and agency than, for instance, high-caste women. In Rajasthan, the practice of nata allows a woman to leave her husband and live with another man, provided the second man pays a bride price to her former husband. This system not only frees the bride’s family from the financial burden of dowry but also places the responsibility of marriage payments on the groom’s family. In many cases, couples live together and even have children while the groom’s family accumulates the required amount for the bride price, after which a formal marriage is conducted.

At the same time, high-caste men frequently invoke tribal customs to suggest that tribal men are unable to “control” their women, portraying them as sexually licentious due to their mobility and participation in labor. My research shows how such caste-patriarchal ideologies are actively reproduced in everyday legal practice by police officers, lawyers, and magistrates. Locally, policing is referred to as rathori, a term derived from the Rathore jati of the Rajput caste. Rathori signifies both the embeddedness of the police in village life and their reliance on masculine forms of authority – violence, coercion, and intimidation.

A case involving a Girassia woman, Merki Bai, who entered into a nata relationship, illustrates how rathori unfolded through the actions of high-caste police officers, lawyers, and a female magistrate.

Rather than engage with evidence, legal authorities focused on Merki Bai’s supposed “bad character” – her decision to leave her husband and go on nata – which they saw as a violation of familial and sexual norms shaped by caste and patriarchy. She was ultimately convicted of murdering her husband. While her natal family took her in briefly after she was cast out of her marital home and before her imprisonment, many women in similar situations are rendered homeless.

Anthropologist Maya Unnithan-Kumar has shown how Girassia women facing domestic disputes are often refused support by their natal families, who argue that the bride price has already been paid and that the woman now “belongs” to the husband’s family—thus severing her claims to kinship and exposing her to social stigma and precarity.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Merki Bai’s case was the role played by Girassia tribal leaders, who not only failed to protect her but actively reproduced dominant caste and patriarchal logics. Their invocation of her “bad character” marked a deep betrayal.

These dynamics cannot be adequately captured by the framework of Sanskritisation – i.e. the imitation of high-caste norms – which has long been critiqued for its limitations. Instead, I interpret this betrayal through the lens of Bhil and Girassia men’s enduring politics of recognition.

Following the psychoanalytic notion of enjoyment, I suggest that for some tribal leaders, there is a kind of satisfaction or affective investment in identifying women like Merki Bai as embodiments of the unruly, transgressive aspects of tribal life that must be purged in order to be deemed respectable by dominant caste society.

The obstacle itself becomes a source of fixation – something from which one draws energy, even when the goal of recognition remains unattainable. In this light, the betrayal of Merki Bai reflects not only the sacrifice of a woman within the community, but also a deeper, self-negating disavowal: a sacrifice of what these men perceive as incompatible with the modern, respectable subject they aspire to become.

Panchayat leaders

Non-state panchayat meetings I attended further complicate any straightforward conclusions about customary law. Panchayat leaders operate on uncertain and shifting terrain – balancing the long shadows of killing and betrayal in the pursuit of recognition from high castes, the imperatives of caste and patriarchal discipline, and the amorous desires and claims of Bhil and Girassia men and women. Their deliberations often involve careful consideration of individual positionalities and contexts. In some instances, their decisions have favoured women’s wellbeing, demonstrating that customary authority is not fixed but contextually negotiated.

These leaders also weave together customary and rights-based discourses, particularly through their engagement with NGOs and social movements such as Seva Mandir and Astha. The Adivasi Vikas Manch that emerged from Astha’s tribal leadership programme, was deeply involved in the local, state, and national mobilisations around the jal, jungle, zameen andolan that ultimately led to the passage and implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA). Tribal women played an active role in these mobilisations, and panchayat leaders drew creatively on both the FRA and customary authority to secure land ownership for Bhil and Girassia families. Yet, in my fieldwork, I did not encounter a single case in which a tribal woman received land ownership through the FRA.

The Supreme Court ruling of July 17, 2025 may offer a way to fill some of the gaps left by the FRA, particularly in recognising tribal women’s inheritance rights. It will be worth it to closely track how my Bhil and Girassia interlocutors engage with and possibly draw upon this ruling. The three moments I have outlined – fratricide, the relinquishing of one’s name, and the sacrifice of a tribal woman – suggest that for tribals, modernity and progress often demand quests for recognition that entail the sacrifice of kin, community, and self.

This brings me to several reflections on the ruling.

First, speculatively, one wonders whether a people’s movement akin to that behind the FRA could have helped animate this judgment. If so, panchayat leaders might have drawn on custom in more creative and transformative ways to secure women’s rights to land – an approach that could have had far greater impact on the very community-based leaders who are already struggling to respond to the alienating conditions that accompany the state’s visions of progress.

Second, the court’s references to custom appear to assume a static and essentialised view of both custom and panchayat leadership. What is required is a far more nuanced understanding – one that refuses the familiar binaries that dominate discourse on tribal customary law: on the one hand, the romanticised celebration of egalitarian tribal norms; on the other, the cynical portrayal of custom as a domain monopolised by corrupt tribal men who manipulate tradition to oppress women.

Finally, the use of colonial-era principles such as “justice, equity, and good conscience” in the contemporary moment risks – borrowing from Stuart Hall – bringing caste and patriarchal ideology back in through the back door. In the absence of a collective political mobilisation, such principles, however well-intentioned, may re-inscribe older forms of authority under the guise of equity and reasonableness, foreclosing more radical possibilities of legal and social transformation.

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