The question of personal laws in India follows this Shakespearean logic as the state routed its engagement with family law through religion to exercise more significant and intimate control over citizens. But as it proceeded to write customs and religion into statutes, alternate authorities/movements emerged to usurp or to challenge the statutes of religious personal laws in India. Furthermore, the statute itself remained a scarecrow with little uniformity in its understanding and inefficient implementation. If one were to extend this Shakespearean metaphor, however, the ineffectual scarecrow provided a perch for the birds of prey (as patriarchy got written into statutes) but was more visible to the watchful farmer (the stakeholders) than before when her adversaries were camouflaged amidst the thickets. Women could rally against an unjust or an ill-interpreted religious statute, than build a critique of religion alone. The codification of personal laws thus achieved the unique feat of making the personal public. It politicized the domestic sphere and rendered religion amendable rather than purging it from public life. Not only did religion acquire characteristics of neutrality but the law also acquired the characteristics of religion.

The interconnectedness and, indeed, reliance of state power on religion, religious forums, and disagreements within the institutions of state rendered impossible the imputation of any will to the state itself. Thus, while the state's complicity in patriarchy and the stifling language of the law it generates has been well established in scholarship, the book traces the historical trajectory of negotiations with the law, offering a glimpse into India's democracy through a conversation over divorce.

Legislation did not tighten the grip of the state on personal law. Complex law-related processes, however, produced an awareness of differences, religious, caste, regional, or customary, which were in a constant state of calibration. This book aimed to capture the shifting meanings and interrelationship between law, religion, family, minority rights, and gender by tracing key developments in personal law in postcolonial Indian politics.