The spice wars? Chutneyfication? The real winners in the Patak family soap opera are the headline writers. Last week, as the family reached an out-of-court settlement, it appeared that the tale of the shares might finally have run its course.
This is the story in brief. The late Laxmishankar Patak, the UK’s uncontested pickle padshah, created a hugely successful business from scratch. In 1974, he divided the business between his heirs, four sons and two daughters, who all received shares. In 1989, Chitralekha and Anila transferred their shares to their mother, Shantagauri. After his father died in 1997, the youngest son Kirit took over the reins. He bought out his brothers. In 2002, the sisters asked to have their shares back and the case went to court.
The sisters said that they had buckled under parental pressure when they signed their shares over, and that Shantagauri had promised to return the shares. This was denied. Kirit Patak argued that he owed his sisters nothing of the present empire, since his hard work had expanded the Patak empire. The sisters, in turn, drew a picture of a conservative and domineering family — they said they were victims of a traditional Hindu mindset that saw sons and not daughters as the true heirs.
To reporters, Shantagauri castigated the elder sister, Chitralekha, for “showing little respect to her elders”. It’s an illuminating statement, not least because it puts an actual price on disrespect — four million pounds, which is what Chitralekha stands to receive from the estimated eight million pound award. That’s the cost not being a dutiful daughter. I’d say it’s pretty steep.
Most family inheritance disputes carry a much lower price tag, but the principle remains the same. The argument in a traditional Hindu family for denying the daughter her legitimate share is elementally simple. Daughters will eventually marry into another family; their wealth will pass on to outsiders. Besides, the cost of the daughter’s wedding and dowry covers everything she might expect from her family. If the logic sounds familiar, it should be: it’s taken straight from Manu’s laws, which make no bones about the fact that women have little identity of their own beyond being either property or a stepping stone to property. An undutiful daughter is twice disinherited: first by common custom, and second by transgressing the code of “acceptable” behaviour.
Shantagauri’s stand could have been scripted by old-world Hindi cinema. There she is, defending the good son’s hard work and decrying the unworthy sisters. There was a price on the shares that belonged to Kirit Patak’s three brothers, though — a price that the businessman paid. The daughters’ shares were seen as legitimate parental property: a gift that they had no real right to. Proving prejudice in court is not easy, and perhaps it is just as well for the sisters that a settlement was reached.
The issue is not whether daughters should have a share in family wealth, but why they should be disqualified at all. If the argument in the Patak case is that the women didn’t earn their shares — well, neither did their three brothers, right? To be disqualified because your chromosomes are the wrong sort is like saying that you can’t inherit property because your eyes are the wrong colour. We wouldn’t accept the latter argument as logical; but it makes just as much, or just as little, sense as the former.
