Reconsidering Customary Law: Local Legalities in and Beyond Colonial Rajasthan

Presenter:

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Abstract

Most often bifurcated between customary and colonial law, the historiography of jurisprudence in British India has long maintained a division between legal practices inherited from European models, to ones of indigenous origin. Recent literature has tempered this division to suggest the various ways in which customary practices were in fact codified by British legal scholars, seeking to posit a generalizable model within which to understand traditions inconsistent with their own. This work hints at an important overlap that, when further probed, can help us to better understand how colonial and indigenous legal institutions operated in tandem. This is especially true of India’s princely states, which, though enjoying titular administrative autonomy, often deferred to British legal norms while simultaneously working beyond them. This paper explores this contention through the lens of a regional tribunal in the Marwar state of Rajasthan. The nineteenth century tribunal, known as the khat darshan, provided a local forum in which higher-caste landholding claimants – Brahmans, Mahajans, Charans, and Bhats among them – could seek redress to disputes of land use, water infrastructure, and other agro-social grievances. Limiting the tribunal’s access to particular communities necessarily cached the proceedings in a context of intensely local social relations, while at the same time positioning them on the lower rung of a higher (colonial-inspired) legal ladder, above which disputes could be appealed. This paper employs the tribunal as a case study to complicate the interconnected nature of legal practices in colonial north India.