The chapter traces Dayan’s military career progression during Israel’s War of Independence, which prepared him for future senior command and leadership positions. It highlights his experiences in battles over Degania and his command of the Commando 89th Battalion, including leading the battalion in the conquest of Lod, and finally his command over the Jerusalem front. In Jerusalem, Dayan became involved in peace negotiations with Jordanian Jerusalem front commander Abdullah al-Tal and later with Jordan’s king, showcasing his diplomatic skills. Dayan acknowledged being blessed with the very best teacher – David Ben-Gurion himself. Ben-Gurion was hugely impressed by Dayan’s political and diplomatic finesse, forging even closer relations with him. However, Dayan’s success also made him a target of criticism and jealousy among former Palmach commanders, making him several enemies.

The chapter provides a detailed account of the second part of Yom Kippur War, starting with the turning point in the war on October 12. It highlights the existential danger that Israel’s leaders believed they faced before the turning point and how Israel’s leaders strategized and made a bold move to cross the canal and encircle Egypt’s Third Army, a move that changed the course of the war. It also discusses the differences in approach between Dayan and Elazar in achieving a ceasefire and how Israel’s leaders used a ruse or move to force one of their enemies to lay down their arms. It also sheds light on the difficult decisions that leaders must make during times of crisis, such as Dayan’s decision to give the order to prevent more losses that could weaken the new defense line. The chapter also discusses the aftermath of the war, including the establishment of a National Commission of Inquiry, the Agranat Commission, to examine the war’s prelude and conduct until October 8. It held the military echelon responsible for the catastrophe, a decision which escalated antigovernment protests and calls for Dayan’s and Meir’s resignations.

As we have seen, the debates about women's inheritance and marriage laws were brought to the foreground by women themselves as early as the 1930s and climaxed in the passage of the Hindu Code Bills in 1956. The discussion spanned a 15-year period and occurred in three different parliaments: the federal parliament, the provisional parliament and the first elected parliament of India. The debates, both within the legislature/parliament and in the public life of the new nation (for example, in feature films, novels and newspaper debates), about the real and imagined consequences of passing the proposed Hindu code into law, constitute a major milestone in post-independence India. It revealed that entrenched patriarchal interests, despite stating their commitment to women's equality, revealed great hostility to translating these into substantive legal provisions.

Is Uniformity Equal to Gender Justice?

The Constituent Assembly (consisting of 15 women in an assembly of 299), which assured women that they would not be discriminated against on the grounds of sex, nevertheless provided exactly such a possibility in the name of religious freedom, which allowed for the continuance of religion-based personal laws. Although the freedom of religion is strictly subject to the fundamental rights listed in part three of the Indian constitution, and also provides for social reform, it was seen as setting a limit on individual freedoms. B. R. Ambedkar, as a framer of the constitution, protested in vain against the retention of personal laws:

Nothing short of a tectonic shift in feminist legal studies has occurred in the two decades since Women and Law in Colonial India was published in 1996. Where I had, at the end of the introduction to the original edition, lamented that a significant body of legal historical scholarship was yet to take shape, the intervening period has seen the emergence of a very sophisticated set of historical investigations which have uncovered not only new kinds of archives, but suggested innovative ways of interpreting old ones. In part, the scholarship has paralleled the extraordinary visibility of legal institutions and questions of law in determining the contours of gender justice and gender relations more generally. The new scholarship has had the effect of challenging some of the assumptions of the earlier edition, refining many of its enquiries and adding to the insights that it drew on.

The new historical investigations have been prompted in part by developments in three interlocking spheres: first, the concerns, disappointments and engagements of contemporary Indian feminism with the domain of law reform, including emerging disagreements between feminists themselves on the wisdom of expanding the domain of state law into greater areas of women's social lives, and possible alternatives that can be explored, given the limits of due processes; second, an increased legal literacy in Indian society more generally, including perverse and wilful use of the legal system as a weapon, and not always as an instrument of change; and, third, a broader set of political transformations that have made feminist understandings of women and law available to jurisprudential practice and to political readings of the place of law in matters of right versus faith, family versus individual, community versus women's rights, and so on. These are at times aligned with, while at others they remain disjunct from, feminist law reform and legal strategy.

In classrooms and seminars, streets and courtrooms alike, in two of India's most tumultuous decades, the relationship between women and the law has been critiqued, redefined, redrawn and generally productively recharged. The massive public participation in the redrafting of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013, following national public outrage at the ‘Nirbhaya’ rape of 16 December 2012, renewed memories of the incredible optimism about law and its transformatory capacity in the 1983 amendments to the rape law.

In August 1936, Muthulakshmi Reddy, member of the AIWC and of the Madras legislature, said in an article entitled ‘A Plea for Marriage Reform’: ‘Marriage at any cost, under any circumstances and at any age has proved a bane to our Hindu community and has produced many undesirable results.’

Reddy's critique of the institution of marriage was important in its timing, coming at the end of a long phase of activity aimed at reforming the structure of the Indian family. Ashwini Tambe usefully tabulates ‘laws affecting the form of the family 1800–1947’ to include both those related to marriage (such as sati abolition, widow remarriage, women's right to property and succession acts) and those not related to marriage (ranging from the criminalization of homosexuality and the abolition of infanticide and the devadasi system, to protectionist measures in factory laws and the Maternity Benefit Acts). In crucial ways, the reforms of the previous century challenged a plurality of conventional kinship networks which were no longer adequate in meeting the demands of an urbanizing, modernizing society under the twin pressures of nascent capitalism and colonialism.

The transformations that affected the family form were not striving towards a preconceived homogeneous ideal. The extraordinary changes effected by colonial rule throughout the 19th century made the material and heteronormative (that is, relations between men and women) foundations of conventional familial relationships more visible but also more unstable, necessitating the recasting of the family. Some of this recasting occurred within the legal-juridical space, making obligations and rights of members of the emerging forms of family enforceable in a court of law, bringing to the foreground one of the principal functions of the family, as a means of transferring property.

On the face of it, total war would seem to be fundamentally and entirely at odds with the very notion of individual freedom. Yet the relationship between the two was more complicated than that. From the beginning of World War I, much propagandistic effort went into stressing the voluntariness of military or quasi-military service. At the same time, imposing discipline on complex societies triggered major tensions, unintended effects, and subversive behaviors, allowing for some unexpected gains in personal independence. In general, military conflicts exacerbated disputes about the very meaning of freedom – both while they were being fought and when they were being anticipated or commemorated. This chapter discusses three issues: the extent to which military mobilization and enemy occupation created room for female independence, the ways in which contemporaries understood conscription and soldiers coped with it, and the various means by which Europeans endeavored to free themselves from military conflict, from muddling through to principled resistance under Nazi occupation or during the Cold War.

The preface introduces the reader to the enduring fascination with Moshe Dayan, a prominent figure in Israeli history. Dayan’s legacy has been the subject of much debate and controversy among historians, and the purpose of the book is to present both the debates and the author’s own interpretation of Dayan’s life and career. It also highlights the importance of studying Dayan’s legacy, both for understanding Israeli history and for gaining insights into leadership and strategy more broadly. Dayan was a complex figure, with both strengths and weaknesses as a leader and strategist. However, his singular mental abilities, wisdom, experience, and insights continue to make him a compelling figure for study. The chapter also touches on the challenges of studying history, particularly when it comes to interpreting historical events and figures: historical facts are one thing, but interpretation is another. The book attempts to present a comprehensive and accurate historical assessment of Dayan’s life and career.

The quest for individual freedom was defined and pursued in the twentieth century in an environment shaped by moral norms that were established in the nineteenth century, if not before, but continued to be staunchly defended before undergoing a process of adjustment. At the same time, the question arose of what life would be like once these norms had been shaken off or decisively weakened. Furthermore, the selfhood of those who pushed for liberation was contested between coherence and control, on the one hand, and various modes of transgression, on the other. While such issues were first debated and probed in countercultural circles, they had become a mainstream concern by the end of the century, leading to new uncertainties about how far individual freedom should go and whom it should benefit. This chapter explores how sexuality was restrained by a morality that came to be adjusted in the decades after World War II; how the prospect of a “liberated” life emerged, leading to new expectations, but also creating imbalances and bringing disappointments alongside gains; and how the transgressive urge to expand the ego questioned the norm of coherent selfhood before eventually revealing its darker side.

This chapter begins by discussing Gandhi and Tagore’s perspectives on politics and uses those and other ideas to substantiate Nehru’s international political thought. It then goes on to suggest that in order to successfully theorise non-alignment, it is necessary to historicise it. The main argument in this chapter is that non-alignment is best understood not only as an approach to India’s international relations, but also to International Relations in general. Therefore, the case studies chosen are all instances of the breakdown of political processes where India’s national and territorial interests were not threatened, but where India chose to mediate nevertheless.

The chapter delves into Dayan’s early life, tracing his family history from his birth in the first Israeli Kibbutz Degania to his upbringing at Moshav Nahalal. It explores Dayan’s education and the formative events that shaped his character, including his complex relations with his Arab neighbors. Despite admiring the nomadic Bedouin tribes and forming close friendships with some of them, Dayan also engaged in local skirmishes over land disputes. His early exposure to handling weapons and combat, under the guidance of exceptional mentors such as Orde Wingate and Yitzhak Sadeh, honed his skills in guerrilla tactics and leadership. Joining the Haganah early on, Dayan and fellow members were imprisoned by the British, only to be released to aid in the defense of Palestine as the Germans approached. During a British raid against Vichy-controlled Lebanon in 1942, Dayan suffered a debilitating eye injury, which, while halting his operational advancements, ultimately steered him towards a career in politics and a close relationship with David Ben Gurion, Israel’s foremost leader.

The second All India Legal History Congress held in 2021 was themed ‘Pursuit of Legal History of India in the 21st Century’. It featured many eminent historians from different parts of India and the world and covered all periods of Indian history. Among the panels was one in which teachers of law drawn from different Indian universities spoke on the ‘history of women and law’. Many of them prefaced their talks by invoking the glorious, and high, position of women in ancient India, particularly during the Vedic period.

Why does the mythical (high) position of the Aryan (Vedic) woman continue to exert such a powerful hold on not only popular understandings of history but even academic enquiries, despite much feminist argument to the contrary? This book provides historically grounded reasons why the invocation of a glorious Indian past became an imperative for Orientalist and anti-colonial nationalist thinkers alike, in the 19th and 20th centuries, though it did not enchant women in quite the same way. It provides, through a detailed discussion of not just the debates and discourses but also public campaigns, case law and judicial reasoning, a far more complex and nuanced understanding of the law, critically evaluating what the Orientalists and nationalists said about law and women over the last two hundred years. The myth of a ‘glorious ancient Indian past’ and the place of women in it has received redoubled force with the recent rise to state power of the Hindu right under the leadership of the BJP. Such a focus on ancient India, ironically, draws a great deal more from the colonial constructions of Indian history than is usually admitted.

The book provides students with empirically grounded and historically reasoned ways of thinking about the past, drawing on more than four decades of feminist and other scholarship. How does this past animate legal discussions up to the present day? And how has the feminist lens challenged or transformed this understanding? We now know that both state law and custom offered ambiguous opportunities and freedoms, and could have the effect of undermining (some) women's status, in the name of either uniformity or patriarchal normativity.