The codification of personal law and secular citizenship

Revisiting the history of law reform in late colonial India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8961641
AutoresEleanor Newbigin (0000-0002-5782-6327, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, autor correspondente)
Ano2009
Volume46
Fascículo1
Páginas83-104
Data de publicação2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/001946460804600105
OpenAlexW1983836839
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas19
Referências citadas27

Recent debates about personal law and a uniform civil code in India have seen both Hindu and Muslim leaders insist on the ‘religious’ status of Muslim law vis-à-vis a more secular or ‘civil’ Hindu legal system. This article argues that such claims obscure very important similarities in the development and functioning of these legal systems. Tracing the origins of the current debate to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debates about law reform, it argues that the systems of personal law in operation in India today are the outcome of late colonial attempts by Hindu and Muslim male reformers to alter their legal systems in ways that served their own interests. The ways in which they succeeded in securing these ends were very different; colonial constructions of Hindu and Muslim religious practices, and later partition, shaped the context within which male reformers sought to assert their claims, before the state and their own religious communities. Thus, far from marking an inherent difference between Hindu and Muslim law, claims about the ‘civil’ or ‘religious’ status of the legal systems serve in both cases to underpin particular forms of patriarchal authority and gender inequality

Citizenship · Civil law (Civil law · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Hinduism · Islam · Legal history · Political science · Politics · Public law · Religious Law · Secularism · Sharia · Sociology · State (computer science · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Philosophy · Religious studies