This important volume is a major contribution to the interface between religion and law in independent India. The result of a cooperative International project, this multidisciplinary volume includes essays by eminent jurists, legal scholars, historians of religions, political scientists and Sanskritists from India and abroad. This revised and updated edition has new essays on subjects such as the structure of religion and law in India; legal issues affecting the Sikh community; public endowments; and issues relating to caste and conversions.

Examining the constitutional and legal foundations of the place of religion in India, Articles of Faith studies the relationship between religion and state. It closely analyses the decisions of the Supreme Court from the 1950s on Articles 25–30 of the Indian Constitution, as well as other relevant laws and constitutional provisions. The book discusses the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the constitutional right to freedom of religion and its influence on the discourse of secularism and nationalism. While examining the role of the Court in defining and demarcating religion as well as religious freedom, practices, and organizations, this volume also highlights important issues such as interpretative traditions and legal doctrines developed by the judiciary over the years. This new edition has an expanded and revised introduction, which looks at the new literature on secularism and religious jurisprudence, both in India and other secular democracies. It also includes an afterword, which examines recent landmark judgments on religion by the Supreme Court of India, such as the one on triple talaq.

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this convenient resource provides systematic information on how India deals with the role religion plays or can play in society, the legal status of religious communities and institutions, and the legal interaction among religion, culture, education, and media. After a general introduction describing the social and historical background, the book goes on to explain the legal framework in which religion is approached. Coverage proceeds from the principle of religious freedom through the rights and contractual obligations of religious communities; international, transnational, and regional law effects; and the legal parameters affecting the influence of religion in politics and public life. Also covered are legal positions on religion in such specific fields as church financing, labour and employment, and matrimonial and family law. A clear and comprehensive overview of relevant legislation and legal doctrine make the book an invaluable reference source and very useful guide. Succinct and practical, this book will prove to be of great value to practitioners in the myriad instances where a law-related religious interest arises in India. Academics and researchers will appreciate its value as a thorough but concise treatment of the legal aspects of diversity and multiculturalism in which religion plays such an important part.

This volume analyzes the development of the unique and complex nexus of values, beliefs and laws that comprise the Indian legal system, from ancient times, through the period of British colonization, and into the post-Independence era. J. Duncan M. Derrett is one of the world's leading authorities on Indian legal history.

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.

How did India aspire to become a secular country? Given our colonial past, we derive many of our laws and institutions from England. We have a parliamentary democracy with a Westminster model of government. Our courts routinely use catchphrases like 'rule of law' or 'natural justice', which have their roots in London. However, during the period of colonial rule in India, and even thereafter, England was not a 'secular' country. The king or queen of England must mandatorily be a Protestant. The archbishop of Canterbury is still appointed by the government. Senior bishops still sit, by virtue of their office, in the House of Lords. Thought-provoking and impeccably argued, Republic of Religion reasons that the secular structure of the colonial state in India was imposed by a colonial power on a conquered people. It was an unnatural foreign imposition, perhaps one that was bound, in some measure, to come apart once colonialism ended, given colonial secularism's dubious origins.

How can religious freedom be granted to people who do not have a religion? While Indian indentured workers in colonial Trinidad practiced cherished rituals, "Hinduism" was not a widespread category in India at the time. On this Caribbean island, people of South Asian descent and African descent came together--under the watchful eyes of the British rulers--to walk on hot coals for fierce goddesses, summon spirits of the dead, or honor Muslim martyrs, practices that challenged colonial norms for religion and race. Drawing deeply on colonial archives, Alexander Rocklin examines the role of the category of religion in the regulation of the lives of Indian laborers struggling for autonomy. Gradually, Indians learned to narrate the origins, similarities, and differences among their fellows' cosmological views, and to define Hindus, Muslims, and Christians as distinct groups. Their goal in doing this work of subaltern comparative religion, as Rocklin puts it, was to avoid criminalization and to have their rituals authorized as legitimate religion--they wanted nothing less than to gain access to the British promise of religious freedom. With the indenture system's end, the culmination of this politics of recognition was the gradual transformation of Hindus' rituals and the reorganization of their lives--they fabricated a "world religion" called Hinduism.

This book takes up the challenge of legally defining religion in contemporary India by investigating the intellectual history of colonial law.