This article addresses the question of gender disparity and legal awareness in Assam, and attempts to contextualise ‘legal awareness’ among women in the state within a complex framework of the post-colonial legal structure. This is a legacy of the traditional pre-colonial and colonial legal structures, and is reinforced through various social, economic and political forces. Such an approach would enable the understanding of the historical development of legal awareness as such, from tradition to change and its continuity, and also to explore whether there were spaces for women's legal awareness within the traditional constrained sphere of a dominant patriarchal society.
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