Course Description
Exploration of the relationship between law and society in colonial India. Features cases relating to marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, sedition, and criminal conspiracy woven through the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth and twentieth century India.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Additional graduate-level research will be required, and writing in the form of a more substantial, in-depth research paper will be required of graduate students.
Athena Title
Law and Society in India
Undergraduate Pre or Corequisite
One course in HIST or INTL or POLS or RELI or HNDI or LEGL
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will be able to describe the relationship between law and society in colonial India throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the changes in this relationship over this time, in 3-4 sentences.
- Students will be able to analyze primary source legal materials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Indian subcontinent (case-law, statutes, legal reporting in historical newspapers) developed through scaffolding assignments such as journal entries, presentations, and class discussions throughout the course.
- Students will be able to identify the historical implications of contemporary legal developments in India including changes in marriage, divorce, property, and inheritance laws as well as provisions in criminal law and criminal procedure retained from the colonial period such as sedition and describe the significance of adopting a legal historical perspective on these developments.
Topical Outline
- Introduction: Law and the Establishment of the East India Company
- The Role of Legal Intermediaries in the Making of Indian Law
- Law and Social Reform in the Early 19th century: The Debate over Sati
- Rukhmabai’s Case: The Restitution of Conjugal Rights and Legal Reform
- Meet the Abrahams: Law and Indigenous Agency in Colonial-Era Courts
- Jurisdictional Jostling: Forum Shopping from Bombay to Baroda
- Utilitarianism, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code
- The Rise and Fall of the Criminal Jury Trial in India
- The End of Company Rule and the Trial and Exile of Bahadur Shah Zafar
- The Role of Lawyers in the Indian Freedom Struggle
- Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Debates over Political Equality
- The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi in Court
- The India and Pakistan Partition and the Legal Regimes of Evacuee Property
- The 1970s Emergency and the Role of the Indian Supreme Court
- Conclusion and Wrap Up
