Feminists have had spectacular successes transnationally in shifting the norms governing family life through legislation proscribing domestic violence. This article looks at the case of India and asks, how the pursuit of legal rights has shaped the Indian feminist conceptualisations of domestic violence. Through a mapping of feminist interventions on violence in the home since the 1970s, the article shows that Indian feminists have progressively adopted a strictly gendered conception of the phenomenon, which has run afoul of the constitutional equal protection doctrine for prioritising some women over others in the family and proved to be inadequate for addressing violence in non-heteronormative contexts. The article argues that rather than taking the prospects of legal rights against violence in the home to be self-evident, it is instructive to attend to the paradoxes generated by them