In his September 1, 2026 Indian Express commentary on the Manusmriti, legal scholar Prof. Tahir Mahmood (former Dean, Law, University of Delhi’, and an AMU alumnus) attempts to rescue ancient legal traditions from the perceived distortions of colonial translation by offering a benevolent, protective reinterpretation of the famous verse Na stri swatantrayamarhati. He contends that when the text sequentially places a woman under the guardianship of her father in childhood, her husband in youth, and her son in old age, this does not, per se, declare her inferior or unfit for independence. Instead, Mahmood argues that the verse imposes a sacred obligation of “protection” (raksha) and safety upon her male relatives. By translating swatantrayamarhati as “never left unprotected,” he attempts to harmonise classical Dharmashastric jurisprudence with modern statutory maintenance laws, asserting that male oversight is merely an ancient counterpart to a family’s legal duty to provide food, housing, and security for dependent women.
I argue however that, when this 2026 defence of ancient Hindu jurisprudence is placed alongside Mahmood’s long-standing jurisprudential positions—most notably his January 11-24, 1986 Frontline interview during the Shah Bano controversy—a consistent ideological trajectory emerges.
Far from a progressive effort to humanise legal history, Mahmood’s intellectual framework represents a sophisticated defence of systemic patriarchy. Across four decades, his legal logic systematically rebrands female subordination as benevolent care, denies women’s non-monetary economic contributions, and reduces women to perpetual financial and social liabilities who require lifelong male custodianship.
A foundational pillar of Mahmood’s legal philosophy is the absolute rejection of women’s independent economic agency within the marital unit. In his January 11-24 1986 Frontline interview (“Secularism on the Bend”), Mahmood forcefully criticised the Supreme Court’s ruling (April 23, 1985) in Mohammed Ahmad Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum, which had granted a meagre maintenance allowance to a 73-year-old divorced woman under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Mahmood argued that Shah Bano (1916-1992) was not entitled to maintenance from her former husband because she was an affluent woman with three adult, solvent sons—one of whom was a practicing lawyer. Under his interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence, the primary financial liability to support an elderly mother falls squarely upon her male offspring rather than her former spouse, regardless of the duration of the marriage.
When directly (and publicly) challenged on whether a wife’s decades of domestic labour, childcare, and household management constitute an economic contribution to the marriage that justifies post-divorce support or a share in marital property, Mahmood’s response was unambiguous. He rejected the “Western concept of matrimonial property”, asserting that in India, an uneducated or homemaker wife does not make an economic contribution. Instead, he explicitly declared her to be a financial burden: “How is that an economic contribution? On the contrary, she is a liability. She needs to be maintained in any case”. He went so far as to claim that a wife could only legally demand financial compensation for her domestic services if she formally declared herself an “employee” or an “agent of the husband” rather than a mother.
This worldview is far from an isolated legal quirk; it aligns directly with a broader, long-standing tradition of South Asian patriarchal instructional literature designed to socialise women into absolute domestic servitude. A prime historical example is Ashraf Ali Thanwi’s reformist handbook Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments, 1905). Written at the turn of the twentieth century as an instructional guide for Muslim women, Thanwi’s text systematically constructs a piety centered on female self-effacement, unquestioning submission, and absolute obedience to the husband. In Bihishti Zewar, a wife is instructed that her religious duty and spiritual salvation depend on serving her husband as her earthly lord—enduring his tempers without complaint, prioritizing his comfort over her basic needs, and viewing her presence in the household as an act of perpetual devotion.
What Thanwi codified as religious virtue in 1905, Mahmood “secularised” and operationalised as legal jurisprudence in 1986 and 2026. In both frameworks, the woman’s internal value is tied entirely to her domestic utility, while her structural status is reduced to an uncompensated, obedient dependent. Thanwi’s theological insistence that a woman must endure systemic domestic inequity in exchange for heavenly reward seamlessly mirrors Mahmood’s legal assertion that an uneducated homemaker generates no economic value and remains merely a financial liability.
Decades later, in his September 2026 analysis of the Manusmriti, Mahmood deploys this exact same paternalistic logic. By equating the verse’s prescription of lifelong male guardianship with modern maintenance obligations, Mahmood once again reduces female existence to an inherent financial dependency. In all these contexts—whether examining Thanwi’s reformist didactic manuals, classical Sanskrit codes, or medieval Islamic jurisprudence—there is a shared refusal to recognise women as equal economic or legal partners in a household. A woman’s labour inside the home is dismissed as non-existent or dutifully owed, her status is framed as an inherent liability, and her entitlement to survival is made contingent upon the paternalistic charity of male guardians.
This institutionalised denial of agency seamlessly informs Mahmood’s defence of structural male dominance and the restriction of female self-determination. In his discussion of divorce law, Mahmood attempted to construct a facade of gender parity by claiming that Islamic law grants equal rights of unilateral dissolution to both men and women. He argued that a woman can unilaterally discard her husband through khula just as a man can through talaq, and that seeking a judicial decree is merely a confirmatory remedy against male chauvinism rather than a structural requirement.
Yet, this assertion conveniently glossed over the severe, asymmetrical financial penalties embedded in the process. While a man pronouncing talaq retains his assets and merely pays the agreed mehr (dower), a woman initiating khula is legally required to forfeit or return her mehr. When pressed on how an economically dependent, illiterate woman could realistically exercise this right without facing total destitution, Mahmood shifted the entire burden back onto women and their families, insisting that financial terms should have been negotiated in the nikahnama (marriage contract) prior to the wedding. When reminded that young girls and illiterate women rarely possess the agency or leverage to negotiate such contracts, Mahmood dismissed the widespread grievances of Muslim women’s rights groups who characterized personal laws as instruments of oppression, attributing their critique to sheer “ignorance of law”.
This pattern of dismissing female agency culminates in Mahmood’s semantic reinterpretation of classical patriarchal texts. In his 2026 Indian Express column, Mahmood attempts to sanitize the phrase na stri swatantrayamarhati—traditionally translated by both classical commentators and colonial scholars as “a woman does not deserve independence”—by translating it as “never left unprotected”. In doing so, he deliberately conflates the denial of autonomy with an act of paternalistic devotion. By framing the institutionalized denial of female freedom as a sacred male duty of safety, Tahir Mahmood constructs an apologetic framework that shields historic patriarchy from legitimate critique.
As the historian, Mubarak Ali observes in his critical study “Behishti Zewar Aur Aurat” (in his Urdu language book, Tareekh Aur Aurat, 1993), textually mandated codes of female conduct invariably function to “confine the woman within the domestic sphere while sanctifying her subjugation as moral virtue”, and that such normative texts manipulate legal and religious rhetoric to stripping women of independent agency under the guise of protecting tradition.
When read together, Mahmood’s writings across forty years (1986 and 2026) reveal a cohesive, conservative worldview that normalises gender hierarchy under the guise of legal protectionism. Whether relying on didactic texts like Bihishti Zewar, or opposing the Supreme Court’s secular intervention (1985) in Shah Bano, or reinterpreting the Manusmriti for a modern readership, the core thesis remains unchanged: women do not require constitutional equality, independent legal agency, or economic recognition; they merely require male oversight. By recasting the denial of independence as an act of care and framing female domestic existence as a financial liability, Mahmood, relying upon the same rhetorical sleight of hand, provides an intellectual defence of systemic misogyny that ensures women remain perpetual wards of male authority. In both instances (Indian Express, Sept 1, 2026, and Frontline, January 11-24, 1986), systemic misogyny and the denial of gender justice are sanitized as reverence for scriptural tradition and personal law, reducing female autonomy to a negotiable casualty of cultural preservation.
(The author teaches Modern and Contemporary Indian History at the Aligarh Muslim University. His X handle is: @sajjadhist)
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