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.
Like many other natural resources, sand has become integral to technologies that symbolize modernity and development, but that depend upon an imperative of low cost. In India, sand began to be ...commoditized in the early twentieth century as an input in a powerful new building technology, reinforced cement concrete (RCC). With the expansion of cities and major infrastructure projects since independence and especially since the 1990s, sand mining has nonetheless remained characterized by small-scale enterprises and small technologies; it is also controlled by regional powerholders who operate on the legal margins, widely referred to as 'sand mafias'. This article draws upon archival and ethnographic research on sand mining for construction in the city region of Bombay/Mumbai to show that the sand mining industry there has effectively come to operate over time through various methods of drawing marginal value from devalued labour techniques and delegitimized or tactical modes of operation. These destructive-productive activities, at a broad level, constitute micro-practices of contemporary capitalism (modes of flexible accumulation) on a resource frontier. But equally, for many of the people involved in them, their value lies in their unpredictable excesses and terrains of resource-making that likewise buoy changes in the technological assemblage.
Rachel Sturman examines the British imperial system of Indian indentured labor, established in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. She suggests that including the imperial history of indenture ...within a genealogy of international labor rights illuminates the ways in which a welfare orientation also emerged through expansive forms of state power seeking to regulate a coercive labor regime. At the same time, the piece is in step with recent scholarship on the history of indenture that has moved beyond a preoccupation with how it essentially reproduced the conditions of slavery. Instead, she develops recent arguments regarding modern forms of state sovereignty, showing how a critique of the indenture system gave rise to the idea that humanitarian violations could be addressed with pragmatic and minute regulations of the conditions of life and work. Ironically, she asserts, the anti-indenture movement that eventually succeeded in abolishing the system, which was led by Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century, ultimately moved away from a more searching, overarching critique of what constituted legitimate and humane forms of labor.
This forum offers critical perspectives on the intersection between gender and the politics of the human. The three articles that comprise it showcase dilemmas that have produced an impasse in ...feminist politics, as well as the possibilities that feminist analysis offers for rethinking the politics of humanity. The introduction traces the historical intertwining of gender and the human, beginning with the paradox of Enlightenment universalism and female exclusion that launched modern western feminism. It considers both the resilience of this dominant framework of feminist analysis and the limitations it has produced. By examining both the implications of the juridical focus on women's inclusion and rights, and the significance of gender and the body for new forms of modern state power particularly in colonial and post‐colonial contexts, it seeks to sustain new feminist interrogations of the modern politics of the human.
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.
Historically, the abolition of slavery marked the signal moment that established a legal distinction between people and property: people could not be property. If slavery had been based on the ...potential equivalence or interchangeability of people and property, its abolition asserted an absolute legal and moral difference between them. Yet, these dichotomous ways of thinking about persons and things emerged alongside and in tension with a third way of thinking that they now obscured, in which property and personhood were closely linked—in which property tied people to communities, to particular histories, and to personal status; property was what was ‘proper’ to the person. While the trade in and ownership of persons has been broadly condemned, this connectedness of property and personhood has remained crucial to modern notions of the individual, privacy, and subjectivity. Indeed, the story of the emergence of the modern legal subject is often told as the progressive, if inevitably incomplete, process of publicly superceding this linkage of property and personal status, and limiting it to a demarcated private sphere. Such formulations construe the family as a domain where persons and things will necessarily continue to be linked, where relationships will inevitably blur affective, moral, and material claims, and where relationships of status will continue to prevail.
