scholarly journals Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1147-1195 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANDINI CHATTERJEE
Keyword(s):  
State Intervention ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Domestic Relations ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Personal Law

AbstractOne of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws.

Public Finance and Personal Law in Late Colonial India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Newbigin
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Personal Income Tax ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Personal Law

This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and specifically the development of a direct, personal income tax, impacted legal subjecthood during India’s transition to Independence. It shows how early twentieth-century understandings of economic value and public finance were embedded into Indian society and legal system through discussions about personal law. This had particular consequences for Hindu personal law, which, under pressure from a centrally administered income tax regime, was re-imagined as a singular, homogeneous all-Indian legal system in ways that rendered the Hindu joint family synonymous with the representative and fiscal structures of the Indian state.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Contexts of Indian Secularism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akeel Bilgrami
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Secularism ◽  
Personal Law ◽  
Jawaharlal Nehru ◽  
Nation State Formation

Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi shared the view that India’s nationalism made secularism unnecessary, for secularism is a notion whose conceptual genealogy is in a specific historical context, an idea designed to repair the damaging effects of European nation-state formation. An alternative Indian nationalism was to consist in a reconstruction of what they took to be India’s unselfconsciously pluralist traditions; the genuine and lived pluralism of ordinary Indian social life was to be replayed in the political arena of anti-imperialism. Secularism, both in Europe and post-Independence India, consists not in neutrality among religions but in a lexicographical ordering between the commitments to freedom of religion and to fundamental constitutional rights. The exception granted by the Indian state to Muslim personal law ought not to be seen as a denial of secularism but as a suspension of the secular ideal in the context of the history of a collective human subject.

‘Useful’ and ‘Earning’ Citizens? Gender, state, and the market in post-colonial Delhi

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1924-1955
Author(s):  
ANJALI BHARDWAJ DATTA
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The State ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Disaster

AbstractThe Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

Trustee, State and Stakeholder: Hindu Temple Management in Contemporary India, 1957–2012

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
Tetsuya Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Role ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Interest Groups ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Temple

The literature on temple management in colonial and post-colonial India focusses on the dominant role of the trustees and the impact of state intervention. However, this article tries to grasp significance of the role of the stakeholders in the temple management as a bridge between the trustees and the state by analyzing the management history of the Rani Sati temple from 1957 to 2012. It will first explain the historical background of this temple and its managers, the Marwaris. The second section analyzes the form of the temple management from the 1950s to 1970s, and the judicial case against the traditional temple stakeholders, then chief priest and his family members. Because of the national controversy over sati in the late 1980s, public interest groups emerged as the new stakeholders of the temple. Third, this article clarifies the state’s intervention in the temple’s management according to the influence of new the stakeholders. By focussing on the role of the stakeholders, this article discloses how a state intervention can be initiated by the stakeholders and the possibility of transformation of the temple management. JEL: M14, K41, Z12

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter sets the scene for the case studies that follow in the rest of the book by characterising the ‘age of modernism’ and identifying problems relating to language and meaning that arose in this context. Emphasis is laid on the social and political issues that dominated the era, in particular the rapid developments in technology, which inspired both hope and fear, and the international political tensions that led to the two World Wars. The chapter also sketches the approach to historiography taken in the book, interdisciplinary history of ideas.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

The Dual Penal State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Penal State ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Patriarchal Power

Dual Penal State: The Crisis of Criminal Law in Comparative-Historical Perspective addresses one of today’s most pressing social and political issues: the rampant, at best haphazard, and ever-expanding use of penal power by states ostensibly committed to the enlightenment-based legal-political project of Western liberal democracy. Penal regimes in these states operate in a wide field of ill-considered and little constrained violence, where radical and prolonged interference with the autonomy of the very persons upon whose autonomy the legitimacy of state power is supposed to rest has been utterly normalized. At bottom, this crisis of modern penality is a crisis of the liberal project itself; the penal paradox is merely the sharpest formulation of the general paradox of power in a liberal state: the legitimacy of state sovereignty in the name of personal autonomy. To capture the depth and range of the crisis of contemporary penality in ostensibly liberal states, Dual Penal State leaves behind customary temporal and parochial constraints, and turns to historical and comparative analysis instead. This approach reveals a fundamental distinction between two conceptions of penal power, penal law and penal police, that run through Western legal-political history, one rooted in autonomy, equality, and interpersonal respect, and the other in heteronomy, hierarchy, and patriarchal power. Dual penal state analysis illuminates how this distinction manifests itself in the history of the present of various penal systems, from the malign neglect of the American war on crime to the ahistorical self-satisfaction of German criminal law science.

Solving the Internet Jurisdiction Puzzle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Jerker B. Svantesson
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Cyber Security ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Reform Initiatives ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Privacy Law ◽  
History Of

Internet jurisdiction has emerged as one of the greatest and most urgent challenges online, severely affecting areas as diverse as e-commerce, data privacy, law enforcement, content take-downs, cloud computing, e-health, Cyber security, intellectual property, freedom of speech, and Cyberwar. In this innovative book, Professor Svantesson presents a vision for a new approach to Internet jurisdiction––for both private international law and public international law––based on sixteen years of research dedicated specifically to the topic. The book demonstrates that our current paradigm remains attached to a territorial thinking that is out of sync with our modern world, especially, but not only, online. Having made the claim that our adherence to the territoriality principle is based more on habit than on any clear and universally accepted legal principles, Professor Svantesson advances a new jurisprudential framework for how we approach jurisdiction. He also proposes several other reform initiatives such as the concept of ‘investigative jurisdiction’ and an approach to geo-blocking, aimed at equipping us to solve the Internet jurisdiction puzzle. In addition, the book provides a history of Internet jurisdiction, and challenges our traditional categorisation of different types of jurisdiction. It places Internet jurisdiction in a broader context and outlines methods for how properly to understand and work with rules of Internet jurisdiction. While Solving the Internet Puzzle paints a clear picture of the concerns involved and the problems that needs to be overcome, this book is distinctly aimed at finding practical solutions anchored in a solid theoretical framework.

Political and Economic History of Land-Grabs in India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
The State ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

This chapter begins with tracing the roots of colonialism in India, followed by understanding its various structures and processes of resource-grabbing. It argues, that India has largely followed the colonial approach towards land appropriation. After independence, although the Indian state followed a nationalistic path of development, the developmental approach of the state was far from being pro-peasant and/or pro-ecology. In a similar fashion, hydroelectricity projects in Kashmir, developed by NHPC from 1970s, have been displacing thousands of peasants from their lands and houses. Despite this, they are yet to become a major debate in the media, in the policy circles, or in academia in India.

Standardized Education With Free Textbooks

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenia Roldán Vera ◽  
Susana Quintanilla
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Previous History ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Teaching Quality ◽  
The State ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of

The Mexican policy of state provision of standardized textbooks for all was instituted in 1959 and still ongoing. This is an overview of the previous history of state intervention in the production and distribution of school textbooks, an examination of the particular circumstances in which the 1959 policy was figured and implemented, and a description of the characteristics of the different generations of textbooks that have since been published, corresponding with several educational reforms. The arguments for and against standardized textbooks mobilized by different sectors of society throughout sixty years are discussed in their historical context. Far from this being a debate about the authoritarian intervention of the state in education, issues of social equality and teaching quality have been central.

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