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A Note on the Study of Indian Legal History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Extract

In his commentary, “The Historiography of Difference,” Kunal Parker hits on two crucial and interrelated themes that form the framework for debates in modern South Asian history: colonialism and subaltern agency. In this short response to Parker's comment, I address both of these issues and also offer some insights about methodological obstacles in the writing of Indian legal history.

Type
Forum: Response
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2005

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References

1. See Elizabeth Kolsky, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” and Parker, Kunal M., “The Historiography of Difference, Law and History Review 23 (2005): 631–83 and 685–95Google Scholar.

2. See Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Dirks, Nicholas B., Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

3. Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)Google Scholar and Guha, Ranajit, ed., Writings on South Asian History and Society, Subaltern Studies 3 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

4. See Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)Google Scholar and Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

5. See the Brief Amici Curae of Legal Historians submitted in support of the petitioners in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Shafiq Rasul, et al., Petitioners v. George Bush, et al., Respondents, available online at: http://www.law.uc.edu/archives/butlerdata/liberty/gitmo/legalhistorians.pdf

6. Lisa Hajjar, “Torture and the Future,” Interventions: A Middle East Report Online Feature (http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/hajjar_interv.html).

7. Letter No. 44 (1834) from the Court of Directors to the Government of India in NAI, Home (Public).

8. Scott Michaelson and Scott Cutler Shershow, “The Guantanamo ‘Black Hole’: The Law of War ‘and the Sovereign Exception,’” January 12, 2004 (http://usa.mediamonitors. net/layout/set/print/content/view/full/3849).