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The Government of Social Life in Colonial India

The Government of Social Life in Colonial India Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women's Rights

Author: Rachel Sturman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107010376
Published In: May 2012
Format: Hardback , 312 pages
Jurisdiction: International ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it challenges existing scholarship, showing how – far from being a system based on traditional values – Hindu law was developed around ideas of liberalism, and that this framework encouraged questions about equality, women's rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival sources, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organising principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.

• Important new analysis of religious law in colonial India, showing how it operated and how it impacted on women's rights

• Empirically rich and wide ranging, the book illuminates how society played an important role in colonial governance and Indian nationalism

• Sophisticated book for scholars of South Asian history, law, colonial history, religion and gender studies

Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xvii
Map of the Bombay Presidency in British India	xviii
Introduction	1
Part I: Economic Governance	33
1. Property between Law and Political Economy	35
2. The Dilemmas of Social Economy	70
Part II: The Politics of Personal Law	107
3. Hindu Law as a Regime of Rights	109
4. Custom and Human Value in the Debates on Hindu Marriage	148
5. Law, Community, and Belonging	196
Conclusion	233
Select Bibliography	239
Index	271