Review of Mihira Sood's 'Courting Equality'

The Nirbhaya rape case was like “a bomb exploded inside the collective Indian psyche,” writes Mihira Sood in her book Courting Equality: Landmark Cases in the Battle for Women’s Rights, capturing the public outrage that followed the 2012 assault. The anger forced the state to confront the shortcomings of India’s legal framework and led to the formation of the Justice J.S. Verma Committee. The committee recognised that sexual violence could not be addressed through harsher punishment alone and reflected the state’s persistent failure to create conditions in which women would feel safe.

The reforms were soon tested in the Farooqui and Tejpal cases. While the Delhi High Court overturned Farooqui’s conviction, Tejpal was acquitted in 2021—an acquittal that was recently reversed. The original decisions, as Sood writes in her book, revealed the difference between social and judicial understandings of rape and its legal definition.

That distance between legal reform and lived reality forms the foundation of Sood’s Courting Equality. Spanning five decades, the book moves from the Mathura rape case and the women’s movement of the 1970s to contemporary battles over workplace rights, personal law and religious freedom. It is a history of how women’s equality has been argued, resisted and redefined through courts and beyond them.

The strength of Courting Equality lies in the way it places landmark judgements within the larger social movements that shaped them. The cases are not treated as isolated milestones but as moments when women’s rights challenged existing institutional discrimination. The Mathura rape case becomes the first major turning point in this journey. The accused were acquitted because of the absence of physical injuries and the court’s interpretation of her lack of resistance as indicating consent. Sood shows how the judgement exposed flawed assumptions about rape, consent and women’s testimony. She also highlights how the open letter from four scholars sparked protests that strengthened the demand for legal reform.

One of the most compelling conflicts running through Courting Equality is the tension between protection and empowerment. The book repeatedly examines moments when measures presented as safeguards for women have also restricted their choices.

The discussion of Anuj Garg v. Hotel Association of India becomes central to this argument. The case dealt with restrictions preventing women from working in establishments serving alcohol, justified in the name of safety. Sood presents the judgement as an important shift away from the stereotypes that “victimised women in the name of protection”.

The tension between protectionism and empowerment resurfaces in the book’s discussion of the Uniform Civil Code. Sood distinguishes the secular code once advocated by feminists from the law enacted in Uttarakhand. She questions whether the reform will necessarily liberate women or merely repackage paternalism as protection. Her critique of the mandatory registration of live-in relationships exemplifies how the state can claim to safeguard women while subjecting their private choices to greater scrutiny and control. Sood is clearer in her criticism but devotes less attention to the counterargument that, without documentary recognition, economically dependent women may struggle to prove the relationship when seeking maintenance or other remedies.

Religion forms another central part of Courting Equality’s examination of equality. Through personal law and cases such as Narasu Appa Mali and Shah Bano, the book explores the constitutional difficulty of addressing practices within religious communities that affect women’s rights. The “ghost of Narasu”—the Supreme Court’s hesitation to overrule the Bombay High Court’s reasoning and test discriminatory personal law against fundamental rights—becomes a recurring presence in Sood’s account. The book shows how the court’s hesitation has preserved a shield that allows inequality within the family and faith to survive.

The discussion reaches its most visible point in the Sabarimala case, concerning the exclusion of women between approximately 10 and 50 years of age from the temple—a restriction associated with menstruation, ritual purity and the celibate character of the deity. Here, the conflict between individual rights and community claims comes to the forefront. The book examines the Court’s use of the essential religious practices doctrine and the larger question of how constitutional courts should approach religious traditions. Sood’s argument centres on the individual, whom she describes as “the smallest minority”.

Here, Sood's emphasis on individual autonomy powerfully highlights how communities can restrict the rights of individuals within them. Sood considers Justice Indu Malhotra’s concern about outside interference in religious practices, but she dismisses it as a ‘circiular logic’ that would make religious practices unquestionable. However, Sood does not devote enough time to the argument that requiring an affected insider can protect faiths from motivated litigation.

Sood writes from a clear viewpoint and with confidence. Her prose is direct, and she moves comfortably between doctrine, political history and feminist critique. For readers without much of an understanding of law and judicial language, she makes the subject accessible. Sood is also able to expose the patriarchal assumptions concealed beneath the seemingly neutral language of the law.

This clarity gives Courting Equality its energy but also defines its limitation. The book is rarely unclear about where the law should arrive; it is less patient with the conflicts encountered along the way. Courting Equality never mistakes legal history for a straight line of progress. Sood’s phrase “rage, reform, repeat” captures the book’s essence: outrage produces change, attention fades, and the harder work of implementation and social transformation remains. Her warning that legal reform is not a “silver bullet” is not an argument against law but a call to recognise its limits and sustain the political and social struggles required to translate formal rights into lived equality.