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"Legal polycentricity India."
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Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India
How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. A family dispute resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. Chandra Mallampalli uses this case to examine the lives of those involved, and shows that far from being products of a 'civilizing mission' who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately - when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system - obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.
eBook
Divorcing traditions : Islamic marriage law and the making of Indian secularism
\"This book seeks to reshape our understanding of secularism, Muslim law, and divorce in contemporary India. Drawing on the most seminal recent analyses of secularism--including those of Hussain Ali Agrama and Saba Mahmood, as well as the longstanding work of Talal Asad--Lemons argues that secularism in the post-colonial Indian context entails not the separation of religion from the state, but rather the state's definition and regulation of religion, and hence the inevitable intertwining of religion and politics. Neither a particular disposition, nor a particular content, the secular marks instead this regulatory interest of the state (as well as of non-state actors). This insight enables Lemons to show how a variety of arenas that respond to marital strife and adjudicate divorce among Muslims--ranging from women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats), to jurists' fatwas, to \"Shari'a\" courts, to muftis' ritual healing practices--are engaged in the secular work of continually defining religion and law\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Law Addressing Diversity
Of late, historians have been realising that South Asia and Europe have more in common than a particular strand in the historiography on \"the rise of the West\" would have us believe.
eBook
Race, religion, and law in colonial India : trials of an interracial family
\"Through a landmark court case in mid-nineteenth century colonial India, this book investigates hierarchy and racial difference in the British encounter with Indian society\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A theory of legal apparitions: Regulation and escape in Indian divorces
When people do not approach a formal court of law to settle their disputes, and cannot enter into out-ofcourt settlements either, what do they do? I find that people install court-like processes which mimetically follow the court procedures, executing the settlement as if the decision were rendered officially. By examining such practices in the case of divorce-related disputes in India, I advance a theory of legal apparitions, a phenomenon in which cosmetic mimicry of legal processes creates a new form of extra-legal resolution. This is likely to prevail in societies where access to justice is hindered due to socio-institutional factors and customary forms of adjudication are not possible (sometimes because of state law's design). This idea can be used to explain a range of practices observed in South Asian societies, where people's imagination of, and interaction with, legal apparatuses creates new forms of institutions.
Journal Article
The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda
The British Empire created channels for imperially intended movement. Commodities, bodies, and ideas flowed along axes structured by imperial law and technology. Unintended motion also occurred along these same planes. With every legal structure meant to promote one type of behavior came litigants devising strategies to achieve the opposite. Collusion, bribery, forgery, and perjury were favorite ways to manipulate imperial law. The more permissible strategy of forum shopping was another. Forum shopping is the attempt to push one's case into a jurisdiction promising an optimal result when there is ambiguity over the controlling jurisdiction. It reveals the perception among litigants that bottom-up—and sideways—mechanics exist within legal systems. Unlike work on resistance to state law through extralegal means, I here examine the ways parties tried to work strategically within the confines of the legal system to reconfigure their marital situations. Rather than documenting the success of these maneuvers, however, I note their more common failure. The colonial courts usually saw through unconvincing attempts to forum shop. The fact that litigants continued to try reflects the ingenuity, arguably, of the “legal lottery” mechanism at work in British imperial law. Colonial law, and therefore colonial rule, reinforced its hold on subjects by dangling before them the possibility of individual relief through rule-of-law proceduralism.
Journal Article