Placing the contemporary discussion on personal laws in India in historical perspective, this important book views the debate as a critical component of Indian democracy. Balancing the imperatives of multiculturalism, national integration, and gender justice, it affirms that there is a complex continuity between the terms of the debate in the postcolonial Indian state and its colonial counterpart.

"In the waning days of colonialism in Papua New Guinea, much of the rhetoric from local leaders pushing for self-determination focused on replacing the imposed colonial legal system with one that reflected local customs, understandings, relationships, and dispute settlement techniques-in other words, a "uniquely Melanesian jurisprudence." After independence in 1975, however, that aim faded or began to be seen as an impossible objective, and PNG is left with a largely Western legal system. In this book, the authors-who were all directly involved in law teaching, law reform, and judging during that period-explore the potent and enduring grip of colonialism on law and politics long after the colonial regime has been formally disbanded. Combining original historical and legal research, engagement with the scholarly literature of dependency theory and postcolonial studies, and personal observation, interviews, and experience, Making Law in Papua New Guinea offers compelling insights into the many reasons why postcolonial nations remain imprisoned in colonial laws, institutions, and attitudes"--

The distinct personal laws that govern the major religious groups are a major aspect of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, and support specific gendered rights in family life. Nation and Family is the most comprehensive study to date of the public discourses, processes of social mobilization, legislation and case law that formed India's three major personal law systems, which govern Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. It for the first time systematically compares Indian experiences to those in a wide range of other countries that inherited personal laws specific to religious group, sect, or ethnic group. The book shows why India's postcolonial policy-makers changed the personal laws they inherited less than the rulers of Turkey and Tunisia, but far more than those of Algeria, Syria and Lebanon, and increased women's rights for the most part, contrary to the trend in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan and Nigeria since the 1970s. Subramanian demonstrates that discourses of community and features of state-society relations shape the course of personal law. Ruling elites' discourses about the nation, its cultural groups and its traditions interact with the state-society relations that regimes inherit and the projects of regimes to change their relations with society. These interactions influence the pattern of multiculturalism, the place of religion in public policy and public life, and the forms of regulation of family life. The book shows how the greater engagement of political elites with initiatives among the Hindu majority and the predominant place they gave Hindu motifs in discourses about the nation shaped Indian multiculturalism and secularism, contrary to current understandings. In exploring the significant role of communitarian discourses in shaping state-society relations and public policy, it takes "state-in-society" approaches to comparative politics, political sociology, and legal studies in new directions.

Shows that law it is often better understood as an entangled web rather than as a coherent, orderly system.

In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.

The essays in Erotic Justice address the ways in which law has been implicated in contemporary debates dealing with sexuality, culture and `different' subjects - including women, sexual minorities, Muslims and the transnational migrant. Law is analyzed as a discursive terrain, where these different subjects are excluded or included in the postcolonial present on terms that are reminiscent of the colonial encounter and its treatment of difference. Bringing a postcolonial feminist legal analysis to her discussion, Kapur is relentless in her critiques on how colonial discourses, cultural essentialism, and victim rhetoric are reproduced in universal, liberal projects such as human rights and international law, as well as in the legal regulation of sexuality and culture in a postcolonial context. Drawing her examples from postcolonial India, Ratna Kapur demonstrates the theoretical and disruptive possibilities that the postcolonial subject brings to international law, human rights, and domestic law. In the process, challenges are offered to the political and theoretical constructions of the nation, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and women's subjectivity.

The viability of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) has always been a bone of contention in socially and politically plural South Asia. It is entangled within the polemics of identity politics, minority rights, women’s rights, national integration, uniform citizenry and, of late, global Islamic politics and universal human rights. While champions of each category view the issue from their own perspectives, making the debate extremely complex, this book takes up the challenge of providing a holistic political analysis. As most of the South Asian states today subscribe to a decentralised view and share a common history, this study is an excellent comparative analysis of the applicability of the UCC. In this work, India figures prominently, being the most plural and vibrant democracy, as well as accounting for almost three-fourths of the region’s population. This provides the backdrop for an analysis of the other states in the region. This second edition will be indispensable for scholars, researchers and students of law, political science and South Asian Studies.

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.

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.

A critical analysis of how international law operates in the ideology of the postcolonial state to marginalise minority groups.