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- Convenors:
-
Justin Jones
(University of Exeter )
Nandini Chatterjee (University of Exeter)
- Location:
- C301
- Start time:
- 26 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Discussing how forms of legal adjudication and religious identities were profoundly transformed by their mutual encounter, this panel interrogates the interactions of law, whether defined in terms of state legal principles or normative legal practice, and the management and experience of 'religion'.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to interrogate the interactions of law, whether defined in terms of state legal principles or normative legal practice, and the management and experience of 'religion' in South Asia. Building on a wide body of literature which has examined how forms of legal adjudication and religious identities were profoundly transformed by their mutual encounter, this panel invites discussions of such subjects as the administration of religious personal laws, state management of religious institutions, court interventions into 'religious' questions, or the centrality of legal autonomy in the making of religious community identities. This panel aims to bring together papers on colonial India and postcolonial South Asia in comparative perspective, as well as linking studies of South Asia's multiple religious communities and their various interactions with law.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nandini Chatterjee (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the judicial career of the first Indian and first Muslim judge to sit on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the final court of the British empire. It explores Justice Amir Ali's social vision, especially his placing of Islam in modern society, and does so by connecting his better known philosophical, historical and legal writings with his reasoning in legal judgments.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will look at the judicial career of Sayyid Amir Ali (1849-1928), the first Indian to hold the post of judge on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. To South Asianists, Amir Ali is well-known for the key role he played, as a founder member of the Muslim League. He has also been studied for his highly publicized engagements in the debates over the nature of Islam and the nature of ideal modern Muslim society. In all this, Amir Ali appears to be a committed sectarian and has been derided for his 'failed Islamic modernism'.
However, for the greatest part of his public life, Amir Ali worked not as a politician but as a judge in the highest of colonial courts (High Court of Calcutta before the JCPC), and dealt with dozens of routine cases involving women and men litigants, interpreting common law as it applied to India, but also Islamic and Hindu law as admitted within the British imperial and colonial legal systems. A survey of his decisions, shows him to be equally, if not more active in interpreting Hindu law as Islamic law, and fully awake to the realities of social life in India's complex religious context.
This paper looks at the many decisions on Muslim and Hindu law, which Amir Ali dispensed or contributed to, examining them for the social vision that they implicitly expressed and the argument of cultural expertise which he used to claim authority.
Carimo Mohomed (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to analyse Chiragh ‘Ali’s political and legal thought, especially his work "The proposed political, legal, and social reforms in the Ottoman empire and other Mohammadan states" (Bombay: Education Society Press, 1883).
Paper long abstract:
After the Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858 and the end of the Mughal Dynasty, many were the Muslim political intellectuals who sought to reform and revitalize Islam in India and as a whole. The responses were various and the debates would surpass geographical boundaries, anticipating questions which are relevant nowadays, like gender relations, new forms of religious institutionalization and the role of religion in politics.
Chiragh 'Ali (1844-1895), an associate of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) and of his Aligarh Movement, often refuted, in his writings, missionary and Orientalist criticisms of Islam as being hostile to reason and incapable of reform. He rather argued that the Islamic legal system and schools were human institutions capable of modification.
While defending that the Qur'an ("Mohammadan Revealed Law") taught religious doctrine and rules for morality, Chiragh 'Ali was of the opinion that it did not support a detailed code of immutable civil law or dictate a specific political system. His arguments on interpretation of hadith and the possibility of ijtihad drew on an examination of the traditional sources of the Islamic law and methods to overcome the rigidity of the traditional theologians. Rejecting all classical sources of jurisprudence except the Qur'an, Chiragh Ali attempted to construct a new basis for the law - for him there were certain points in which the Shari'a ('Mohammadan Common Law') was irreconcilable with the modern needs of Islam and required modifications, always using the Qur'an as a source.
Justin Jones (University of Exeter )
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on Anglo-Muhammadan Law, this paper examines the interactions between ‘traditional’ Muslim scholars and the legal system in colonial India. It claims that, rather than the two existing in isolation, the ‘ulama began to interact with many institutions, and assumptions, of colonial adjudication.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages scholarly debate on the subject of Anglo-Muhammadan Law, the hybridized amalgamation of English and Islamic law (shari'at), which became the major framework for the administration of Muslim legal affairs in British India. Much of this work has implied an artificial split between 'modernist' Muslims, those lawyers, judges and politicians who were closest to the colonial state and most engaged with its legal system; and the 'ulama, the traditional guardians of the Islamic Law who are seen as isolated from it.
This paper examines this vexed debate concerning rival claims to jurisdiction over Muslim legal affairs. It claims that, far from the two groups existing in isolation from each other, the 'ulama began to appropriate many assumptions of colonial legal adjudication. Many strove to establish an infrastructure of 'shari'at courts' modelled on their colonial equivalents; others spoke of formulating universally binding legal decisions, an enterprise which resembled British efforts at legal codification. The result of this particular interaction with colonial legal institutions and understandings of law was the development of a synthesised shari'at that, at least in intent, was more institutionalised, codified and objectified, something that has influenced understandings of Islamic Law until today.
Raphaël Voix (Centre for South Asian Studies, Paris, CNRS-EHESS)
Paper short abstract:
Through an ethnographical analysis of the “Tandava Case”, this paper questions the way legal adjudication affected Ananda Marga’s own religious identity and contributed to its institutionalization after its founder’s death.
Paper long abstract:
On 10 August 1979, disciples of Ananda Marga - a Hindu sect founded in 1955 by a Bengali civil servant - carried a procession within the city of Kolkata during which they performed a dance with skulls, which they call 'Tandava'. A long case followed about the right to practice this dance in public, opposing the sect's General Secretary to Kolkata's Police commissioner. In 2004, the Supreme Court eventually rejected the sect's plea. Considering that tandava's performance in a procession was not an essential religious rite for every Ananda Margi, it prevented its practice to be protected by the Constitution of India.
Though this verdict constitutes a setback for Ananda Marga, followers believe, on the contrary, this judgment to be the one that the sect's had been waiting for since their guru's death in 1990. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court, in its judgment, declared that Ananda Marga could be appropriately treated as a "religious denomination" and that it belonged to the "Hindu religion", thus giving - unintentionally - a place in the broad real realm of Hindu religion.
Through the analysis of the trial's proceedings, the sect's internal literature and interviews with main protagonists (disciples in charge, judges, solicitors and Kolkata's Police Commissioner), this paper questions the way legal adjudication affected Ananda Marga's own religious identity and contributed to its institutionalization after its founder's death.