S C Shah: ‘We have had Hindu law varying from place to place, province to province, having all kinds of local customs and family customs ... it is a very great thing that we will, for the first time, have a uniform code at least for the Hindu community.’ All who questioned that uniformity was a great thing were labelled and dismissed by the ‘progressives’ led by Nehru as reactionaries. Some argued that diversity was not itself an evil, and, more important, that Hindu law had not been imposed by the state or other authority from above but had grown from popular consensus and that this character
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