Mahatma Gandhi's legacy to the world, and to India especially, is immeasurable; his life and work have left an impact on every aspect of life in India; he has addressed many personal, social and political issues; his collected works number nearly 100 volumes. From these Kapadia has gleaned a few thoughts about women and social change. In 1940, reviewing his twenty-five years of work in India concerning the role of women in society, Gandhi says, "My contribution to the great problem lies in my presenting for acceptance truth and ahimsa (non-violence) in every walk of life, whether for individuals or nations. I have hugged the hope that in this woman will be the unquestioned leader and, having thus found her place in human evolution, will shed her inferiority complex... Woman is the incarnation of ahimsa. Ahimsa means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for suffering. And who but woman, the mother of man, shows this capacity in the largest measure?... Let her translate that love to the whole of humanity... And she will occupy her proud position by the side of man... She can become the leader in satyagraha... "
What is significant and what Kapadia underlines here is Gandhi's image of woman and his hope for her, so radically different from that of any earlier reformer.

The gravest form of the problem is dowry death, the enormity whereof can be visualized by the fact that according to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, in 1994, there occurred a dowry death in India every 102 minutes. According to a statement made by the State Minister for Home Affairs in the Parliament of India, the number of dowry deaths in 1993 was 5,817. As far as property is concerned, the present position is that 99% of property is held by men. Inheritance is governed by the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 and in respect of agricultural lands, which constitute 90% of the total property in India, by the respective land laws of the states concerned. Sub-section (2) of Sec. 4 of the act, specifically excludes the application of the act in respect of agricultural holdings and almost all the land laws have given preference to male inheritance. Even under the Hindu Succession act, despite the loud proclamation of gender equality under the Indian Constitution, a female heir is practically entitled to only a negligible fragment of property inasmuch as in India 90% of the property is ancestral property and the majority is governed by Mitakshara coparcernary law, and according to Section 6 of the act (applicable in the case of intestate succession) read with the Schedule of the act, a female heir would inherit only a little unless she is the only heir out of the 12 categories specified in class I of the schedule. Female inheritance will give financial security to women and will eliminate the rationalization of money transfer before and/or after wedding in the form of dowry and/or "stridhan".

The paper is a survey and an analysis of Hindu women's rights to property (stridhana) in India. The first part deals with the connection between the Indian dowry and property. In fact, for centuries, dowry has been the only property of Hindu women. The second part is a diachronic study of the law according to the traditional Hindu law-books, the dharmasastras. The interdependence between dowry, considered for centuries as a substitute for inheritance, and inheritance itself has also been investigated. The most authoritative Indian books of law from the Manavadharmasastra (2nd-3rd A.D.) until the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, and some major commentaries and digests on them, have been considered. The third part of the study focuses on the legal fracture between the concepts of property and stridhana under the British rule. The British misinterpretation of the traditional law allowed women to have full property rights only with certain restrictions and only when still alive. The third and fourth part of the paper analyze the Hindu Women's Rights to Property Act (1937) and the Hindu Succession Act (1956). In the last part there is an attempt to answer a few questions arising from the study.

Sati, the ancient custom in the Hindu religion of a wife being burnt with her dead husband, does not seem to have been enforced in ancient Nepal, that is during the rule of the Licchavi dynasty (c. A.D. 300-879). In this paper, about 190 stone inscriptions from this period are considered. The only Licchavi inscription which has a reference to the sati system is the inscription of Manadeva I at the Changu Narayana temple in the north-eastern corner of the Kathmandu valley (A.D. 464). This inscription does not refer to the committing of sati but abstention from it. Moreover, out of the total 190, there are 18 stone inscriptions that were installed exclusively by widows during the Licchavi period. Of the 18 inscriptions of widows, only 3 were by members of the royal family. These are some instances that evidently indicate the abstention from sati, but there is not a single piece of evidence in any of the 190 inscriptions from the Licchavi period in Nepal that it was carried out.

This the account of Ms. Bandita Phukan. She is the first woman mechanical engineer in the state of Assam. When her father died in 1993, her relatives tried to find a son of a cousin to perform the last rites (Shraddha), because her father did not have a son. Bandita revolted, and asked the priest to permit her to perform the last rites. First, the priest refused. The last rites of a dead person can be performed only by a male member of the family, and never by a daughter. Bandita did not give up. At her insistence, a Brahmin priest came forward and allowed her to perform the last rites of her father. If married Hindu daughters could be allowed to perform the Shraddha cerimonies, concludes Phukan, their surviving parents would be happy to have "a dear daughter as eligible as their dear son."

This paper offers an analysis of one of the remedies that could be suggested for dowry: young women should refuse to marry as soon as the groom's family asks for dowry. It gives statistics and examines: 1) the cases of dowry-deaths in India; 2) the geographical distribution of the concentration of dowry deaths per million Hindu population. In the last part of the paper, Thakur outlines three immediate, and a long-term solutions for women who refuse to marry because of the demand for dowry.

In the Philippines, at the time of the Spanish conquest, the Catholic priests were instructed by Bishop Salazar to learn and preach in the languages of the inhabitants. However, certain clusters of words, especially those involving Animist priestesses were altered, negated and then marginalized almost to extinction. This movement paralleled the demonization and eventual disappearance of the priestesses from historical texts. The paper aims to: 1) describe the process involved in this double negation; 2) recover the forgotten words; 3) restore Animist priestesses to their rightful place in Philippine history.

In Mauritian Society there is a rise in domestic violence. Cases of battered children, women in distress and complaints from male partners are increasing. The Government is sparing no effort to grapple with these problems through its wide network of services, such as counseling, prompt intervention and other means. Mauritius is a tiny multicultural island in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Madagascar and the south-east coast of Africa. Its population of approximately 1.2 millions originates from Africa, India, China, and Europe, though the majority of it originates from India. In this paper the author analyzes the reasons and the remedies for this growing problem.

For several months in 1994 Leslie made a collection of clippings on dowry deaths from several papers in India: the daily newspapers The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Indian Express, the monthly India Today, and an occasional Times of India. She noted that the giving of dowry in the first place is traditionally justified in terms of giving the daughter her "inheritance" at the time of marriage, even though only a small proportion of that dowry is ever intended for her own use. Through this unsystematic survey, Leslie studied whether dowry deaths were a middle-class phenomenon, how prevalent was the custom of demanding and giving dowry, and whether dowry deaths and the system of dowry were generally increasing. She asked people who was to blame for dowry, and the result was that 83% of the women respondents in this study criticized the system of dowry, while men said that women were responsible for it. She concludes that anyone can be victimized by the dowry system, even men. Her last question is whether dowry is the real problem. Finally she lists a series of proposals to eradicate the phenomenon.

The paper by Ram Narayan Tripathi is a survey of the traditional forms of Hindu marriage through the scriptures and its connection with the modern crime of dowry and bride-burning in India. The author asserts that it is hard to comprehend that the ancient scriptures of India which propounded the social laws with understanding, logic, justice and wisdom, thereby establishing one of the most enduring civilizations in the history of mankind, suddenly became illogical and started to produce outrageous customs like dowry and bride-burning "which are just one step better than cannibalism". According to Tripathi, the only explanation appears to be that there was a period of overall decadence during which individuals survived by sacrificing many values, which resulted in the degeneration of all dimensions of life, including corruption of some scriptures. The period of degeneration continued for such a long time that it became second nature to the people, and they forgot how the customs started in the first place. It would be worth carrying out an intensive study of this period of Indian history.

This paper focuses on two main topics: sati and dowry in Vedic times. The wife was bound to her new family for life, and beyond it. Whether she had to follow her husband to the other world at the time of his death or shortly afterwards, has been a keen topic of discussion. ...gveda 10.18.8 talks about the return of the widow to her settlement, together with her relatives. In Atharvaveda 18.3.1 this argument is further expanded. These passages indicate clearly that a widow was not to be buried or cremated with her husband. Later Vedic texts are silent on the topic. In short: there was no sati in the Vedic texts, from the ...gveda down to the Upanisads and the Sutras. In the case of dowry, even less material is visible from the early Vedic period. However, even in the ...V there are a few indications of the right of women to inherit. In the post-...gvedic texts, the Br-hmanas, it is clear that a woman was regarded as the possession of her husband, and generally in a socially lower position. In some texts there is a form of "a bride price" to get a husband for the daughter. On the other hand, dowry in a mild form existed as well: at the time of marriage, the father of the bride gave presents to the bridegroom. These gifts were expressively described as "mutual" between the groom and the bride or their families. In Vedic India, the wife did not have her own possessions; she did not even own herself. If women, especially brotherless maidens, were freer than they were in later India, their freedom was restricted in many ways. Bride burning or dowry deaths, of course, did not occur at all. Dowry did exist at the time, but is was given in a framework of mutual exchange between the two families involved.

Taslima Nasrin gave this lecture in April 26, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). Never previouly published, it is about women who want to be writers and poets. It is about herself and her problems as a writer in Bangladesh nowadays. These difficulties are both due to Islamic fundamentalism, and to the general idea that the education of women would ruin the family. Educated girls would forget their rituals, neglect their husbands and their families. In a reaction to the initial attempts to educate girls, the idea was spread that women, if educated, would become widows, which means their husbands would die. Another common idea is that the educated women would lose their virtue. There is a saying in Bengali to the effect that if women put on shoes the lunch is spoiled. Working women are still very rare in Muslim middle-class families; some of them work for wages but mostly in the informal sector like private tutoring, or they are teachers at schools, colleges, hospitals and a few other types of institutions.
In this situation one can hardly expect hundreds of women to take up the pen. There are women among the authors and journalists in Bangladesh, but there are few in number.
The problem grows up when a Bangladeshi woman wants to do some really creative writing. As long as a woman writes about males, stories or poems, as long she imitates the style and subject matter of male writers, as long she follows the beaten track, and as long as she remains conformist, she will be all right. But if someone starts saying what she really means, editors and publishers are bound to raise their eyebrows. Indeed, the moment a girl in Bangladeshi society starts writing, the first reaction of men is that there must be something wrong with her. Why should a happy housewife want to write? Men think girls with problems usually end up in a mental asylum, become prostitutes, or commit suicide. And those who cannot do any of thse things, pick up the pen and shamelessly intrude into the men's world. The paper continues with questions, comments, and speculation regarding herself. Nasrin describes her career and problems she has being a free, atheist woman writer in a Muslim patriarchal country. The talk is followed by her reading of poems, and by more than an hour answering the audience's questions.

This is a report of two evenings I spent with Taslima Nasrin in April 1996 in Cambridge (USA). Nasrin is a poet and writer; she was awarded the 1995 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Nasrin came to Cambridge to deliver lectures. Especially during the first, informal meeting and dinner, I approached Nasrin as a woman and a friend, trying to understand her, and to delve into her public, dramatic persona as a controversial and criticized writer and polemist, and as a symbol of freedom for thousands of women writers in the world.