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greater shares of such property. Changes in commonly applicable laws that provide alimony to the indigent, offer security and economic support to women and children facing domestic violence, and punish the practice of dowry reinforced the effects of the Hindu law reforms. Proposals are also currently being considered to enable no-fault divorce under conditions of irretrievable marital breakdown even if the respondent resists the divorce petition, along with giving women greater rights to alimony, child support, and custody, and enabling courts to give them shares of matrimonial property.
    These reforms were introduced although regimes continued to value broad coalitions and did not abandon the rural groups that had defended patrilineal authority soon after independence. Indeed, the intensification of political competition and the decline of the Congress Party starting in the late 1970s made the retention of support a greater concern for parties, and agrarian groups gained greater political representation even while their share of the population gradually declined. Moreover, political elites did not prioritize personal-law reform any more than they had in the first postcolonial decade. Nevertheless, changes in the following variables enabled the earlier-mentioned family-law reforms: forms of social, economic, and residential organization; salient discourses about the nation, its religious and other cultural traditions, and indigenous forms of modern family life; patterns of political competition and social and political mobilization; and the composition of policy bureaucracies.
    Urbanization and industrialization reduced the importance of landed property, especially for men, who shifted to nonagrarian occupations more than women did. This reduced resistance among rural men to giving women access to land and weakened lineages, whose power rested primarily on land control. The increase in first generation rural-urban migrants and tendencies toward circular migration between rural and urban areas blurred the boundaries between urban and rural experiences and mentalities. Moreover, joint-family residential arrangements gradually declined, particularly among urban and professional groups, leading to a shift from the lineage to the nuclear family as the primary social unit with which many members of these groups felt an affective tie. 1 Many political elites changed their understanding of the forms of family life appropriate for India accordingly, and became more willing to empower the nuclear family, divide joint property (including agricultural land) into separate shares, require the bilateral devolution of family property, and increase women’s property rights.
    Majoritarian visions of the Indian nation gained popularity, especially starting in the 1980s. Hindu nationalists demanded the rapid adoption of a UCC especially after
Shah Bano
, but did not gain sufficient support to introduce this change. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led national coalition governments from 1998 to 2004, some of its allies had significant support among the religious minorities that they were unwilling to lose by supporting a UCC. Moreover, when Hindu nationalists became the most vocal champions of a UCC from the 1980s, many of their opponents shifted their attention from a UCC to the reform of the existing personal laws. This was true of women’s organizations, other rights organizations, and the communist parties.
    Pluralistic visions of the nation assumed new forms through closer engagement with various cultural traditions, both durable and emergent. Pluralist nationalists changed personal law more than the Hindu nationalists did, and selectively appropriated cultural repertoires in favor of reform. While claiming continuity with the social visions underpinning traditions of religious law, they also became more willing to adopt Western legal precedents. They relied on such sources to promote conjugal autonomy and women’s economic