English law and English literature were closely, yet variously connected during Britain's imperial domination of India. Anglo-Indians – the English who lived and worked in India – have been enrolled in the “configuration of law and letters” traced throughout this study: the first English judge at Calcutta was the poet and Oriental linguist, Sir William Jones; the nineteenth-century administrator, Sir Alfred Lyall, was a poet and critic. Both men were admired by E. M. Forster, not only for their literary avocations, but for their interest in Indian culture, a rare combination in Anglo-India:

Forster's question challenges a century-old policy of “Anglicization” that was most forcefully expounded by another literary lawyer, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his “Minute on Indian Education.” Macaulay's assertion of “the intrinsic superiority of … Western literature” under lay an Anglocentric education policy that, by producing “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect, ” would ensure cultural domination.