Summary:
This book analyses religious law in colonial India, exploring how it encouraged gender equality and a rethinking of the relationship between state and society.


From the early day 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 analyzes the system of personal 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 his framework encouraged questions about equality, womens rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival Sources, wide-ranging, and theoretically informed, the book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organizing principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.

Contents

acknowledgement
Abbreviations
Map of the Bombay Presidency in British India

Introduction

Part i : Economic Governance

1.Property between law and Political economy
2.The Dilemmas of Social Economy

Part II

3.Hindu Law as a Regime of Rights
4.Custom and Human Value in the Debates on Hindu Marriage
5.Law, Community, and Belonging

Conclusion

Select Bibliography


Index