Home
Law
Legal History
Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947

Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947

Name: Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947
Brand: Cambridge University Press
SKU: 9781107661882
Price: 504.40 HKD
Availability: InStock
Author: Mitra Sharafi
ISBN: 9781107661882

By Mitra Sharafi

Cambridge University Press September 2016

Specifications

ISBN-13: 9781107661882
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication: September 2016
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

Introduction

Part I. Parsi Legal Culture:

1. Using law: colonial Parsis go to court

2. Making law: two patterns

Part II. The Creation of Parsi Personal Law:

3. The limits of English law: the Inheritance Acts

4. Reconfiguring male privilege: the Matrimonial Acts

5. The jury and intra-group control: the Parsi Chief Matrimonial Court

Part III. Beyond Personal Law: '

6. Entrusting the faith: religious trusts and the Parsi legal profession

7. Pure Parsi: libel, race, and group membership

Conclusion: law and identity