Law as Contested Communication

The legal system in the Mughal period has largely been studied within an imperial, institutional frame of reference, and in most well-known works, the legal order is represented as part of the grand narrative of the unifying, centralizing thrust of Mughal empire.1 The dominant tendency is to identify the legal order with the state, and for most historians, it could not have been otherwise, given the centralized and bureaucratic structure of Mughal imperial rule in South Asia.2 The inadequacies of these formulations are evident to scholars oriented towards regions and localities and their work reveals a vastly plural legal order, in which the state was at best one among several other judicial institutions.3 Inspired by the concept of ‘legal pluralism’ these historians describe the Mughal legal order as enjoying a plural space, and multiple jurisdictions. Their studies coalesce with the arguments of scholars of legal pluralism, who are interested in exploring the forces of heterogeneity in the juridical spaces the world over. One could here take the case of Lauren Benton who has, in her influential work on the global legal order, argued that the development of colonialism the world over has seen a shift from a plural legal order to a state centered legal order.4 With a much finer focus on the laws in South Asia, Werner Menski has suggested that the legal order was historically shaped by communications among three plural sources of law: local customs and traditions, state laws, and religious/cultural norms.5 To these, he has in his later work, included the international laws, developing what he terms as ‘the kite model of law’ with all its four corners constituting the legal order.6

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