Iterations of Law

Description

Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India advances new perspectives on legal history from South Asia. While earlier historians looked at the results rather than the performance of law, the contributors to this volume examine the socioeconomic and political contexts that shape law-making and its practice.
The chapters of this volume interrogate ‘from below’ the framing of legal regimes, and explore the physical and epistemic violence of colonial law. The contributors look at the ways in which colonized subjects shape the contours of legal spaces through constant interchange, conflict, and adjustment between the rulers and the governed.
The volume critically engages with not just archival material ranging from case law to legal treatises but also everyday records of rule to investigate the relationship between the discipline of history and the institution of law. It focuses on the complex moments in the life of the law when rights or claims simultaneously bring into existence a new economy of power and authority.

About the Editors

Aparna Balachandran teaches in the Department of History, University of Delhi, India. She writes on law and urbanism in early colonial India. Her monograph on urban governance and law in early colonial south India is forthcoming.
Rashmi Pant teaches history at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, India. She works on the history of the family, caste, gender, and the village community in colonial India. Her forthcoming monograph is titled Rights of Blood, Claims of Nurture: Contested Meanings of Family and Property in Colonial Garhwal.
Bhavani Raman teaches in the Department of History, University of Toronto, Canada. Her publications include Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (2012).

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Iterations of Law: Legal History from India
APARNA BALACHANDRAN, BHAVANI RAMAN, AND RASHMI PANT
1. The Life of Law in Modern India: A Present History of the Matha Court
JANAKI NAIR
2. Speaking in Multiple Registers: Property and the Narrative of Care
RASHMI PANT
3. Violence and the Languages of Law
NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA
4. Law in Times of Counter-insurgency
BHAVANI RAMAN
5. Petition Town: Law, Custom, and Urban Space in
Colonial South India
APARNA BALACHANDRAN
6. ‘To Mount or Not to Mount?’ Court Records and Law Making in Early Modern Rajasthan
NANDITA SAHAI
7. Power, Petitions, and the ‘Povo’ in Early English Bombay
PHILIP J. STERN
8. Of Truth and Taxes: A Material History of Early Stamp’t Paper
SHRIMOYEE GHOSH
9. Public Finance and Personal Law in Late Colonial India
ELEANOR NEWBIGIN
Bibliography
Notes on Editors and Contributors
Index