Law and Life in South Asia
A conference at Yale University
May 11 and 12, 2006
Henry R. Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Avenue
Sponsored by the South Asia Studies Council and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale.
Extensive, well-established and widely used legal systems are some of the most important legacies of colonial rule in South Asia. The language and experience of legal regulation and litigation - the FIR, the affidavit, etc. - have all become integral parts of everyday life in the region in the course of the twentieth century. Moreover, the law, adjudication and legal protection is at the heart of virtually every major political controversy in the region – in India, for example, from the rulings on the Babri Masjid, job reservations for backward caste groups, to questions of the pro-Hindu leanings of the police force and whether Muslims enjoy equal rights and habeas corpus in the country. In Pakistan, questions concerning the legality of emergency ordinances, the status of the court system during the suspension of normal parliamentary rule, women’s rights and the relationship between Sharia law and civil law have all been central in the last decades. The notion of a codified law does of course have a very long history in the region. Colonial jurisprudence interpreted elements of existing systems of law and incorporated cultural and religious ideas of justice across the subcontinent. That influence is still visible in actual legal texts but perhaps even clearer in practices of adjudication – formal or informal – and in notions of ethical conduct in everyday life.
The law has an equally important role to play in more intimate matters – from family law and inheritance issues, to disputes over land and assets within families, and legal regulation of access to housing, medication and education. In all these matters, the definition of law as well as ideas and practices of neutrality or objectivity in law have been informed by notions of gender. These notions also play into the ways in which the legal system is served, both officially and informally, by an intricate system of mediating specialists – lawyers, brokers, touts, locally elected politicians, and activists – who broker access to courts and manage the process of translating everyday occurrences or grievances into a language of legality. A very large number of issues and incidents, however, never reach the formal legal system. Conflicts are mediated and adjudicated, and punishments meted out, by local panchayats, men of eminence, brokers, strongmen and social movements.
In spite of their sheer size and importance in maintaining democracy and multiple forms of civility and regulation across the region, legal practices, the ‘sense of the law’ and broader processes of adjudication and punishment, have received scant scholarly attention in South Asian studies. Barring a few prominent scholars, and more recent work on legal rights of women and minority groups, most work on law in India has focused either on the ancient period or on the gradual introduction of British law in the subcontinent.
The aim of this conference is to begin mapping and re-conceptualizing this vast field of practices by focusing not merely on the law and legal institutions but more crucially on how the law meets everyday life in its manifold and contradictory forms. The idea is to bring together anthropologists, historians, political scientists and legal scholars from the US, South Asia and Europe to explore the relationships between law, life and adjudication in contemporary India. We will try to delineate two areas of conversation and future research:
Criminality, adjudication and habeas corpus.
Under this heading we will aim at exploring the nexus between changing public discourses on criminality, justice and forms of policing and law enforcement in South Asia. What is just? What constitutes adequate or proportional punishment? Are certain bodies more prone to criminality – and thus more punishable than others? We will focus on the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial regimes of policing and punishment. Work on correctional institutions, policing and court practices – as well as informal systems of punishment – will be brought together in order to map out a more comprehensive history of the meanings and the many forms of habeas corpus in the region. We are also interested in public discourses on justice and injustice – i.e. what constitutes a punishable offense, and what can be seen as a ‘natural,’ innate or inevitable act, proved by passion, humiliation or shame. Atrocities committed during communal riots are, for instance, rarely regarded as crimes but rather as a form of politics. By the same token, caste atrocities or injustices rarely constitute a ‘legal situation’ in public debates but are routinely regarded as symptoms of social problems.
Body, intimacy and the right to life.
Under this rubric, we would like to examine the role of law in more intimate matters, ranging from family and inheritance law, laws concerning access to social services, to the legal regulation of health and reproduction. In surveying the law in relation to the field of new medical practices especially relating to pharmacology and drug-testing, AIDS/HIV and sexual health, and reproductive technologies we hope to highlight the processes by which these issues become subjects of governmental intervention, demanding innovative forms of regulation and adjudication. We would also like to broaden and deepen these concerns into a wider inquiry into the legal regulation of the domestic sphere, into the everyday experience of marriage and divorce law, domestic violence, and property/inheritance disputes. In examining the laws relating to the sphere of the intimate, we hope to investigate and assess the importance of informal legal modes, institutions, and actors - such as local authorities, lawyers, activists, religious and community organizations - that shape the process by which the private is translated into the public language of legality.
