Personal Law and Citizenship in India's Transition to Independence

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELEANOR NEWBIGIN

AbstractStudies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under the control of self-interested sections of the Indian elite. In terms of citizenship, the failure of the state to do more to realize the egalitarian promise of the Fundamental Rights, set out in the Constitution of 1950, has often been attributed to interference by these powerful elite. Tracing the interplay between debates about Hindu property rights and popular support or tolerance for the notion of individual, liberal citizenship, this paper argues that the principles espoused in the Fundamental Rights were never neutral abstractions but, long before independence, were firmly embedded in the material world of late-colonial political relations. Thus, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject of the Indian Constitution was not the individual, freed from ascriptive categories of gender or religious identity, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law.

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELEANOR NEWBIGIN

AbstractThat the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men's property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.


1998 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donal Cruise O'Brien

The relationship between language and politics in the African post-colony remains obscure and underexamined. Here we withdraw into a poorly lit area, an area of potentialities, where new political shapes may emerge as the outcome of half-conscious choices made by very large numbers of people. Language choices in the first place: the expansion of the Wolof language in Senegal, principally though far from exclusively an urban phenomenon, is to be seen in a context where the individual may speak several languages, switching linguistically from one social situation to another. Such multilingualism is general in Africa: the particularity of the Wolof case, at least in Senegal, is the extent to which this language has spread, far beyond the boundaries of core ethnicity, of a historical Wolof zone from the colonial or pre-colonial periods. And these individual language choices cast their political shadow.The political consequences of this socio-linguistic phenomenon are as yet indistinct, but to see a little more clearly one should in the second place relate it to the subject of the politics of ethnicity. Language is of course an important element in any definition of ethnicity, and there is an evident overlap; but the politics of language is also a distinguishable subject in its own right. Where the assertion of ethnic identity can be identified as a possible weapon in the individual's struggle for power and recognition within the colonial and post-colonial state, the choice of a language is that of the most effective code in the individual's daily struggle for survival. Language choice in such a setting may be less a matter of assertion, the proud proclamation of an identity, than it is one of evasion, a more or less conscious blurring of the boundaries of identity. And in Senegal the government itself by its inaction has practised its own shadow-politics of procrastination.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Fernando Ledesma Perez ◽  
Maria Caycho Avalos ◽  
Juana Cruz Montero ◽  
Andrea Ayala Sandoval

Citizenship is the exercise of the fundamental rights of people in spaces of participation, opinion and commitments, which can not be violated by any health condition in which the individual is. This research aims to interpret the process of construction of citizenship in hospitalized children, was developed through the qualitative approach, ethnomethodological method, synchronous design, with a sample of three students hospitalized in a health institute specializing in childhood, was used Observation technique and a semi-structured interview guide were obtained as results that hospitalized children carry out their citizenship construction in an incipient way, through the communication interaction they make with other people in the environment where they grow up.


Author(s):  
إبراهيم محمد زين

الملخّص يهدف هذا البحث لبيان أن السبيل الناجح لمواجهة الإرهاب الدولي المعاصر الملتبس بدعاوي الجهاد الإسلامي وإحياء دولة الخلافة الإسلامية هو التركز على معاني الأمن الفكري والروحي في الإسلام وهذا الاتجاه في المباحثة يُعيد النظر في طرائق قضايا الجهاد ويميز بين ما هو عقائدي ومرتبط بنظام الإسلام الكلي وبين ما هو من مجال حروب الفتنة والصعلكة.  الكلمات المفتاحيّة: الجهاد، حروب الصعلكة، حروب الفتنة، الأمن الروحي والفكري.              Abstract This study focuses on the most effective way of combating global terrorism that utilizes the banner of Jihad and restoration of the Khilafa system of governance. It should be emphasized that there is a dire need for a new line of investigation concerning the issue of Jihad that pays more attention to both spiritual and intellectual security systems in Islam. This requires a distinction to be made between what is universalistic in the Islamic system and what is particular. In this regard one has to differentiate between acts of just war and those of economic or sedition wars. Keywords: Jihad, economic war, sedition war, spiritual-intellectual security system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-442
Author(s):  
Nadia Naim

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to assess how Islamic finance can act as a vehicle to enhance the current intellectual property rights regime in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Islamic finance has developed within the constraints of sharia law and has been a growth sector for the GCC. This article will identify the main principles of Islamic finance that contribute to the success of Islamic finance, which can enhance intellectual property protection in the GCC. The main sharia-compliant areas to be considered are musharaka, mudaraba, murabaha, takaful, istisna, ijara, salam and sukuk. The article will outline the founding principles of Islamic finance, the governance of sharia boards, development of Islamic finance in the individual GCC states, different frameworks of sharia-compliant investment products and the impact of intellectual property rights on the varying Islamic finance investment tools. Furthermore, the article will discuss an integrated approach to intellectual property rights which learns lessons from the Islamic finance sector in relation to infrastructure, regulation and sharia compliance. The lessons learnt from Islamic finance will inform the overall framework of recommendations for an Islamic intellectual property model. The use of Islamic finance as a vehicle to promote better intellectual property rights in terms of defining a new intellectual property approach is novel. It is aimed at spearheading further research in this area, and it will form a part of the overall integrated approach proposals to intellectual property protection in the GCC and beyond.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001946462110203
Author(s):  
Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati ◽  
Prithvi Sinha ◽  
Sneha Garg

This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai’s reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity—a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity—provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fall-out with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy’s oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women’s movement.


Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fanthorpe

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.


2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (05) ◽  
pp. 1385-1403 ◽  
Author(s):  
KITAE SOHN ◽  
ILLOONG KWON

Trust was found to promote entrepreneurship in the US. We investigated whether this was true in a developing country, Indonesia. We failed to replicate this; this failure was true whether trust was estimated at the individual or community level or whether ordinary least squares (OLS) or two stage least squares (2SLS) was employed. We reconciled the difference between our results and those for the US by arguing that the weak enforcement of property rights in developing countries and the consequent hold-up problem make it more efficient for entrepreneurs to produce generic goods than relationship-specific goods—producing generic goods does not depend on trust.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-127
Author(s):  
Nicoletta Varani ◽  
Enrico Bernardini

Abstract Planetary interdependence makes the task of states and international organizations to guarantee security inside and outside national borders ever more urgent. The tendency is to widen the space from national to international and to conceive of security as multidimensional for the satisfaction of human needs, assumed as priority needs with respect to those of the States. The old concept of national security must today confront the new concept of human security cultivated within the United Nations, which places the fundamental rights of the individual and of people at the centre of attention and lays the foundations for overcoming the traditional politics of power. The concept of human security emphasises the security of the individual and his protection from political violence, war and arbitrariness. It takes account of the strong correlation between peace policy, human rights policy, migration policy and humanitarian policy. The contribution provides, through a series of social indicators such as the Global Peace Index (GPI), Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the World International Security and Policy Index (WISPI), a framework on risk, security, human rights violations in the African continent and examines some significant case studies related to sub-Saharan Africa.


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