Local and Customary Forums

Research studies and common experience have shown that women suffering violence rarely engage with formal institutions such as courts and police stations without the support of their family and community elders. The entry into a formal institution is often planned following the advice of a worldly wise uncle, a local leader, a relative in the local police station, a woman activist or a caste elder. It is the strength of these conversations which determine women’s relationships with the formal law. There is emerging evidence about the different forums that are involved in negotiating laws against domestic violence such as political party offices, gram panchayats, caste panchayats, counselling centres and women’s groups. These spaces are often referred to as non-state agencies or local and customary forums. Often the terms that animate these local forums are counselling, panchayati settlement and compromise as against the lexicon of decrees, orders and awards obtained in the formal legal system. While a bond-paper settlement is looked down upon as a document that has no validity in the courts, it becomes an important device to ‘settle’ issues in the local forums. This article seeks to understand the practices of these forums that not only mediate women’s access to the formal institutions but also hear cases in their own offices. On a parallel track, the article examines the interconnected ways in which the formal legal system and local forums relate to each other. Even as formal law makes no allowance for the verdicts of the local forums, the imagination of the local and customary as quick, effective and flexible has been a desirable ideal for its own functioning.