By Devrupa Rakshit (she/it)
Artivist | Independent Multimedia Journalist | Ex-Lawyer
Walk into any Indian home and you’ll likely find it brimming with a woman’s touch: clothes folded just so, masalas hand-ground and stored in recycled dabbas, pressure cooker whistling in the background, and beds made with military precision. For generations, many, many women in India have labored — emotionally, physically, and psychologically — to build and hold together family homes. And yet, when it comes to owning these homes, their names are often conspicuously absent from the property papers.
Despite legal protections like the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, which grants daughters equal rights to inherit ancestral property, the ownership of homes in India remains starkly skewed against women. The law may have changed, but the culture has not caught up. “Despite the amendment legally granting daughters equal rights to inherit family property regardless of their marital status, deep-rooted gender discrimination continues to affect women’s inheritance in India,” says Julie Thekkudan, the South Asian Consultant with Equality Now, an NGO championing women’s rights worldwide.
Daughters, Not Heirs
From the moment they are born, girls in India are conditioned to see themselves as temporary guests in their own homes; they’re even called ‘paraaya dhan,’ or someone else’s property. “When I first asked my grandma why she’d call me ‘paraaya dhan‘, she told me I was born a girl and as soon as I will be of age, I will be ‘handed over’ to my husband and in-laws, my real family. She called me ‘amaanat,’ a prized possession because I was born to be another family’s wealth. This mindset was there in the air of our home for as long as I remember. My grandma, parents, and relatives all had the same notion of me and all the other daughters of the family,” writes journalist Tanya Malik.
Like Malik’s family, in most families, their claim to the property they grew up in is either never discussed or is actively discouraged. Research shows that in Andhra Pradesh, where the laws were amended as far back as 1986, “rates of land inheritance among women were significantly higher than the other two states surveyed,” which were Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Only 8% of women in Bihar, and 7% in Madhya Pradesh, “had either inherited parental land or expected to do so,” compared to 34% of women in Andhra Pradesh.
“The challenges many women in India face in asserting their inheritance and property ownership rights arise out of longstanding perceptions that daughters are a financial burden on the family,” notes Thekkudan. “Girls are frequently viewed in terms of the future expenses they bring — particularly the cost of marriage and dowry — and this is reflected in how the birth of a girl is often met with indifference or disappointment, rather than celebration.” Instead of being viewed as equal heirs, then, daughters are expected to be grateful recipients of whatever is ‘given’ to them in the form of dowry.
A study on the prevalence of dowry in rural India found that it was paid in 95% of the 40,000 marriages it looked into between 1960 and 2008. As for urban areas, another study noted that 73% of married men and 81% of married women reported participating in the practice.
The Myth of Stridhan and the Reality of Dependency
“Stridhan [woman’s wealth] — the traditional concept of dowry — was originally meant to be given exclusively to the woman and was intended as a form of financial security, to be held in her name and used as she thought fit. However, over time, this practice has been distorted,” Thekkudan explains. Today, in many households, this ‘wealth’ is often registered in the husband’s name, or at best, jointly held — leaving women with little to no actual control over it. “Because this transfer is made in the context of marriage, it often does not give women independent ownership or control over decision-making power.”
Instead of creating security, then, the dowry system has cemented dependency. As Thekkudan points out, “The wealth passes into the hands of the groom and his family, reinforcing the wife’s economic dependence and inequality in property rights.”
And so, the house she cooks in, cleans, raises children in, and grows old in isn’t hers.
Not legally. Not culturally. Not emotionally.
This is a subtle but effective form of economic erasure.
The Caregiver Who Owns Nothing
According to research, more than 70% of primary caregivers for the elderly in India are women. Even as women continue to serve as the primary caregivers — often without recognition or compensation — they are discouraged from asserting ownership over the homes they dedicate their lives to. “Despite no legal claim or control over family property, many women become the primary carers of aging or ill parents. Caregiving is seen as a woman’s duty and extension of her identity,” Thekkudan says.
What’s worse is that even these duties, sacrificial as they may be, are not enough to earn women the right to stay in, let alone inherit, their family homes. Care is expected, but not compensated, despite the fact that caregiving can get in the way of a woman’s ability to earn her livelihood. “I had to move from a full-time job to contractual remote work when I realized [my mother] needed me around. I haven’t been able to give it my 100% as I can’t leave my mother and step out much,” a woman from Delhi, who had to relocate to Agra to care for her aging mother, told HelpAge India.
Yet, any desire for property is often met with suspicion — seen as selfish, greedy, or disruptive to family harmony. “Even as they shoulder these responsibilities, many refrain from asserting their legal right to inheritance, fearing it could destabilise the family. This is even the case in situations where a woman is solely responsible for covering her own expenses, such as when she is unmarried, divorced, or widowed.”
In other words: she can stay and serve, but she must not stake a claim.
Generations of social conditioning — often perpetuated through the gendered roles assigned to women as caregivers and homemakers — have taught Indian women to see themselves as secondary. Their worth is not linked to what they own, but to how much they give away. “Women in India have long been socially conditioned to view themselves as almost second-class citizens, taught to be grateful for being born and permitted to live and marry,” says Thekkudan, explaining how this upbringing fosters a culture of self-sacrifice, where any assertion of individual rights — particularly economic ones — is painted as betrayal. “This fosters a culture of self-sacrifice, where women are willing and expected to put the perceived well-being of their families above their own rights and needs.”
Cultural norms and media portrayals often reinforce these expectations, creating a sense of pressure and guilt for women who choose to prioritize themselves.
And so, time and again, women choose silence over rights, gratitude over justice, peace over parity.
But when women are denied property ownership, they’re not just losing material assets. They’re losing power, dignity, and a safety net.
“If a woman becomes a widow or her husband deserts her, or she never marries, her slide into poverty might be more rapid,” Thekkudan warns. Without a roof in her name, without land or savings she controls, she is vulnerable to the whims of her in-laws, her siblings, or the state. This vulnerability becomes even more pronounced in times of crisis. “In natural disasters and disruption accompanying armed conflict, women’s lack of material resources often compounds the underlying poverty they are already disproportionately vulnerable to.”
Property, then, is not just about wealth. It is about survival.
Toward Homes That Acknowledge Women’s Labor
For India to move forward, the emotional and economic labor of women must be reflected in ownership. “For India to reach its full potential, women’s equal rights and empowerment must be placed at the heart of the nation’s development agenda, with the notion of a woman as a key contributor to the economy of the household, community, and country actively promoted and embraced.” Thekkudan notes.
“All governments must review and amend their sex discriminatory laws and put in place clear constitutional or other guarantees of equality, as a matter of urgency, to protect all women’s and girls’ civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights under the Beijing Platform for Action and other international law, standards, and commitments,” notes a recent study by Equality Now that found how sexist laws don’t just persist in India, but across the globe. “[N]ot a single country has yet achieved the goal of fully eliminating sex discriminatory laws set in 1995… Governments have the responsibility to end sex and gender-based discrimination in the law. To truly add equality to improve the lives of women and girls globally, every sector has a meaningful role to play.”
But while laws are important, they aren’t enough. There must be “inclusive and well-funded policies” to ensure that women aren’t just entitled to property in theory but can access it in practice. This includes encouraging the registration of property in women’s names, creating fast-track legal systems to settle family property disputes, and providing legal aid.
“A crucial aspect of promoting and safeguarding economic rights, both within and outside the family, is the simultaneous protection of other human rights. Access to education, healthcare, social security, and freedom from violence empowers women to seek justice and fully exercise their hard-won rights,” she adds, noting that just as importantly, the culture must shift. We must “celebrate the birth of every girl child, encourage and applaud the achievements of girls in schools and universities, and normalize and uplift women’s leadership across all sectors.”
Only then can the houses women build become homes they truly own.
