Download or read book Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia written by Mitra Sharafi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 seem to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.
Download or read book Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia written by Mitra June Sharafi and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, an ethno-religious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma.
Download or read book Personal Law Identity Politics and Civil Society in Colonial South Asia written by Eleanor Newbigin and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Governing Islam written by Julia Stephens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephens argues that encounters between Islam and British colonial rule in South Asia were fundamental to the evolution of modern secularism.
Download or read book Stages of Capital written by Ritu Birla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture. Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.
Download or read book Family Gender and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia written by Kenneth M. Cuno and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection examine issues of gender, family, and law in the Middle East and South Asia. In particular, the authors address the impact of colonialism on law, family, and gender relations; the role of religious politics in writing family law and the implications for gender relations; and the tension between international standards emerging from UN conferences and conventions and various nationalist projects. Employing the frame of globalization, the authors highlight how local and global forces interact and influence the experience and actions of people who engage with the law. By virtue of a "south-south" comparison of two quite similar and culturally linked regions, contributors avoid positing "the West" as a modern telos. Drawing upon the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, and law, this volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of the complicated history of jurisprudence with regard to family and gender.
Download or read book Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond written by Steven E. Lindquist and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together sixteen articles on the religions, literatures and histories of South and Central Asia in tribute to Patrick Olivelle, one of North America’s leading Sanskritists and historians of early India. Over the last four decades, the focus of his scholarship has been on the ascetic and legal traditions of India, but his work as both a researcher and a teacher extends beyond early Indian religion and literature. ‘Religion and Identity and South Asia and Beyond’ is a testament to that influence. The contributions in this volume, many by former students of Olivelle, are committed to linguistic and historical rigor, combined with sensitivity to how the study of Asia has been changing over the last several decades.
Download or read book Fluid Jurisdictions written by Nurfadzilah Yahaya and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. In Fluid Jurisdictions, Nurfadzilah Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. Yahaya explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. To ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law—even against fellow Muslims. Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.
Download or read book The Politics of Personal Law in South Asia written by Partha S. Ghosh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a political study of the controversy surrounding the issue of the uniform civil code vis-à-vis personal laws from a South Asian perspective. At the centre of the debate is whether there should be a centralized view of the legal system in a given society or a decentralized view, both horizontally and vertically. This issue is entangled within the threads of identity politics, minority rights, women’s rights, national integration, global Islamic politics and universal human rights. Champions of each category view it through their own prisms, making the debate extremely complex, especially in politically and socially plural South Asia. So, this book attempts to harmonize the threads of the debate to provide a holistic political analysis.
Download or read book The Post Colonial States of South Asia written by Amita Shastri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text discusses the principal political and constitutional questions that have arisen in the states of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka following fifty years of independence. In Sri Lanka the pressing problems have been around the inter-ethnic civil war, experiments with constitutional designs, widespread prevalence of corruption and the recrudescence of Buddhist militancy. In India it has been corruption, Hindu nationalism and general political instability. In Bangladesh and Pakistan it has been the role of the military, the state and religion. A general theme is an analysis of the malaise that is prevalent and how and why this was inherited, despite the colonial legacy of parliamentary democracy, the steel framework of a trained bureaucracy, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.
Download or read book The Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law aims to publish peer-reviewed scholarly articles and reviews as well as significant developments in human rights and humanitarian law. It examines international human rights and humanitarian law with a global reach, though its particular focus is on the Asian region. The focused theme of Volume 4 is India and Human Rights.
Download or read book Define and Rule written by Mahmood Mamdani and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.
Download or read book The Aga Khan Case written by Teena Purohit and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.
Download or read book Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India 1863 1937 written by Chandra Mallampalli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how Catholic and Protestant Indians have attempted to locate themselves within the evolving Indian nation. Ironically, British rule in India did not privilege Christians, but pushed them to the margins of a predominantly Hindu society. Drawing upon wide-ranging sources, the book first explains how the Indian judiciary's 'official knowledge' isolated Christians from Indian notions of family, caste and nation. It then describes how different varieties and classes of Christians adopted, resisted and reshaped both imperial and nationalist perceptions of their identity. Within a climate of rising communal tension in India, this study finds immediate relevance.
Download or read book Race Religion and Law in Colonial India written by Chandra Mallampalli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. A family dispute resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. Chandra Mallampalli uses this case to examine the lives of those involved, and shows that far from being products of a 'civilizing mission' who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately - when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system - obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.
Download or read book Identities in South Asia written by Vivek Sachdeva and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how identities are formed and expressed in political, social and cultural contexts across South Asia. It is a comprehensive intervention on how, why and what identities have come to be, and takes a closer look at the complexities of their interactions. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, combining methodologies from history, literary studies, politics, and sociology, this book: • Explores the multiple ways in which personal and collective identities manifest and engage, are challenged and resisted across time and space.; • Highlights how the shared history of colonialism and partition, communal violence, bloodshed and pogrom are instrumental in understanding present-day developments in identity politics.; • Sheds light on a number of current themes such as borders and nations, race and ethnicity, identity politics and fundamentalism, language and regionalism, memory and community, and resistance and assertion. A key volume in South Asian Studies, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, politics, sociology, literary studies and social exclusion.
Download or read book Political Identity in South Asia written by David Taylor and published by RoutledgeCurzon. This book was released on 1979 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
