Two Talks: Bihar Elections, Caste-Based Affirmative Action

Intellectual life at Jawaharlal Nehru University is on fire. One usually never needs to venture off campus to get food for thought. After submitting three tutorials and a rough draft of two thousand words, I had some breathing space to attend many talks this past week. Four of them were especially interesting and I will reproduce some of the points below of the two which are most related: Bihar elections and Affirmative Action in India. Another post on informal labor and feminist organizing in India will follow soon after. Please note that I did not use a recording device and sometimes left early. This blog post is my takeaway of the talks. Readers can always find the people's original works to follow up on their opinions.

Public meeting at a mess in JNU, Prof. AK Ramakrishnan (the content of that meeting is not discussed in this post)

I went to a panel discussion on Bihar politics. I have also been drawn to this issue because two friends from Bihar, Abhay and Kishlay, are politically conscious youths from Bihar and have been closely following the events. I was puzzled by the extent to which politicians with constituents outside of Bihar even had to make the decision whether or not to enter the state election campaign. One friend said that the elections in Bihar had a coattail effect, akin to that of the president elections in the U.S. 
In acknowledging of this influence, The moderator / chair Prof. Manindranath Thakur said quite aptly that nowadays, most scholars now look to Bihar to understand Indian electoral politics. There are roughly four stages of Bihar politics, from 1952-1967, the Congress Party dominated the scene. From 1967 to 1972, the Congress Party was still central but had to form coalition governments with other parties. From 1972 to 1990, Congress Party had a comeback wile the chief minister changed with a volatile trend. Since 1990 to now, Bihar politics has been dominated by OBC activism by folksy and later corrupt politician Lalu Prasad Yadav and his party Janata Dal, later RJD. Before 1995 there were no special Dalit booths and afterwards their voter turnout increased significantly. Initially Lalu and Nitish Kumar started in politics together, then they split for decades with Nitesh heading the Janata Dal-United (JDU). Now BJP poses a larger threat in the region for this coming election and Nitish Kumar and Lalu have joined arms again against BJP and its NDA coalition. 

Among the four panelists, political analyst Ajit Kumar Jha gave one of the most forthright opinion on the matter. Unlike the elections in 1995, when only 1 survey poll was done by him and Yogendra Yadav, this year there have been around 10 survey polls. Only 3 of the 10 polls indicated that they favored the other parties over BJP. Thus Mr. Jha does not think the secular bloc can stop Modi, not because Modi is strong but because the previous government has bankrupted many constituents' goodwill. Mr. Jha sees Nitish Kumar frantically copying the styles of Narendra Modi's campaign, such as spending large sums on campaigning. Nitish has also built large museums like Modi, while Mr. Jha thinks it would have been better spent on infrastructure for his campaign. But Nitish has not established a successful campaign equivalent to Modia's Smart City for the village-dominated Bihar. Agriculture performance has been dismal and thus constitutes little leverage. Furthermore, according to his poll stats, more and more Dalits and upper castes are voting for the BJP. 

More reading

"Bihar politics is like Game of Thrones. There are no ideologies, no principles and certainly no ethics. Its pure politics, unadulterated and unsparing to the weak."

Caste politics: Why the Bihar election is tragic, regardless of the outcome. 

Ruled or Misruled: Story and Destiny of Bihar

by Santosh Singh

"Ruled or Misruled offers a 360 degree journey of Bihar politics since Independence, especially since the Congress’ downfall in 1990. An out and out reporter’s book, tells an interesting and tumultuous journey of the post-1990 legends of Bihar politics - Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad, Ram Vilas Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi with the legendary clash between Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi - with the untold version on the 2010 dinner cancellation and Nitish’s ambition, providing the third angle."

So how does the panel relate to the second talk I went to? Caste reservations and caste identity politics, such as the one we see in Bihar, go hand in hand. Many elites and middle class believe that caste politics have ruined Bihar. They often conflate the loud and seemingly rough politicians with the policies, and charge at caste reservations as ways of currying favor. But Professor Ashwini Deshpande's talk on affirmative action in India gives a nuanced and contextual study of Scheduled Castes and Other Backward caste reservations to debunk many of the myths held by the mainstream. In her words, "Everyone has an opinion [about Affirmative Action] but there are few rigorous studies."

Here is a breakdown of the several arguments she responds to and counters.

Common Argument 1: The benefits don't reach the poorest of the poor. 

Yes, that's true. But Affirmative Action is not an anti-poverty program, it only aims for public sector jobs and colleges. To get there they are already the privileged within their backward caste. It won't solve all caste inequalities, but Affirmative Action desegregates the elite and that is a huge development.

Common Argument 2: Job efficiency lowers after introducing Affirmative Action

Her study with Weisskopff of University of Michigan Does Affirmative Action Affect Productivity in the Indian Railways proves otherwise.

Common Argument 3: If lower castes do not get in with the same merit, their confidence decreases while their sense of inferiority increases.

The Shape of the River is a book about African Americans who were accepted in elite universities (Princeton and Ann Arbor); they said despite initial difficulties, it was worth it. Many college graduates reflected that they would go again even if they knew ahead of time about the humiliation they had to face.

Common Argument 4: The clustering effects bring the more privileged backward castes the benefits and positions, while replacing the economically poor upper castes. It's a regressive policy.

Empirical studies on the Indian case (Bertrand et al 2010) showed that in an engineering exam, the Dalits who got in the school were significantly better off than the other Dalits who didn't get in, while the upper castes who didn't get in sought other opportunities and were not so different than the upper caste students who enrolled. Thus the policy is not regressive.

Common Argument 5: Affirmative Action reinforces caste divisions rather than weaken them, such as the Patel agitation.

After the Right to Education Act, there have been reservations based on economic class as well. But the elites continue to complain. In Deshpande's opinion, having to share privilege is the main problem for these elites. 

One important point she made was that many discussions of caste reservations pertain only to the lower caste. The people under general category sounds like they don't have castes, while they do indeed benefit for being Brahmins or Kshatryias. 

I am very heartened to see defenders of progressive policies such as Prof. Deshpande. The same arguments are made by Chinese in the mainland against minorities as well as recent Chinese immigrants in countries that have even more progressive Affirmative Action policies. I hope that there would be more studies similar to Deshpande's angle done on minorities in mainland China as well.

More Reading:

Her book Affirmative Action in India. OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2013.

Methods and Religious Studies

More than two years ago, I presented a paper on the medicine Buddha in pre-Republican era China at my liberal arts college. Without the adequate tools, I could not present the significance of the combination of ritual and medicine beyond the realm of superstition. I read this following passage and had an a-ha moment about religious studies--

A second approach to the question of cultural difference starts from a different assumption, namely, that “real,” substantive, and “immiscible” cultural differences constitute an actually existing dimension of human experience that needs to be dealt with in our analyses. While some analysts have argued that rendering “untranslatable” cultural practices transparent within the hegemonic languages of Western academia amounts to an act of “epistemological violence,” others have argued for the ethical necessity of doing just that. While keenly sensitive to processes of historical transformation in the constitution of modern subjectivities, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, for one, is unwilling to dismiss the existence of (and constitutive role played by) radically different life-worlds within modernity. Self-critically reflecting on his own previous research into the history of factory labor in Bengal, where laborers commonly invoked the agency of Hindu gods to facilitate a range of tasks at hand, Chakrabarty writes that “a secular subject like history faces certain problems in handling practices in which gods, spirits or the supernatural have agency in the world.” Chakrabarty’s solution to these problems is not to cease and desist from writing history, however; nor is it to abandon altogether the task of “rough translation” required to make differences intelligible in academic writing. The latter choice Chakrabarty refuses largely on ethical grounds: “It may be legitimately argued that the administration of justice by modern institutions requires us to imagine the world through the languages of the social sciences,” he reasons, since “one cannot argue with modern bureaucracies and other instruments of governmentality without recourse to the secular time and narratives of history and sociology” (72, 86). At the same time, Chakrabarty urges historians to acknowledge both the “finitude” of history’s secular outlook and the “scandalous” nature of “rough translations” required to render radical forms of cultural difference intelligible in social-scientific discourse (90).

This theoretical analysis by William Glover from Making Lahore Modern’s Introduction (p xvi-xvii) explains precisely the difficulty I faced when writing about Buddhism and medicinal practices in history. It is very difficult to comprehend the development of medicine (and technology) other than a road of teleological progress. Without a broader understanding of medicinal practices at large at the period I was looking at, one can only compare to then-Buddhist practices of medicine and now. This would undermine the credibility of Buddhist tradition of that particular time. If a doctoral and above level work in social science can only amount to “rough translation,” I had an even coarser translation at the time. Is writing religious studies academic papers from a historical viewpoint at the liberal arts level ever possible? (This question is a reflection of my frustration towards historical methods at present; I do not want to question the wonderful aptitudes that religious studies introduced to me two years ago.)

Another question, If one uses history and historicizes religion, how can religion occupy a distinct theoretical space than from culture? I had a conversation with a Buddhist monk recently at JNU. He has completed his MPhil and will start his doctorate soon. He has read extensively and is well-learned in Sanskrit; he plans to tackle Tibetan next. His English conversation skills were limited and we talked in Mandarin. He was easygoing but still assumed more authority in the conversation. We talked about Buddhism both as an academic subject as well as a subject that carries inherent truth that we accept while others may not accept (I am a Buddhist, but for length-sake I will not get into whether or not we should call it a “religion” in this post). I tread lightly when we started historicizing Buddhism, since it was my first time meeting him and he was senior to me--I had no idea if he would at one point abruptly object to the secular social science assumptions which I might impose on the discussion. He never did, but the testing-waters feeling of having social science discussions with people of a religious identity remained.

tomb of Jahangir in Lahore

Another similar challenge that faced Islamic historical writing in the 19th century, also presented by William Glover (p187-188)--

One of the earliest was Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Asar-us-Sanadid (Manifestations of the Noblemen), an account of the city of Delhi composed in the Urdu language. Sayyid Khan first published his history in 1846, illustrating the book’s six hundred pages of text with more than a hundred lithograph prints. The book described Delhi’s historical palaces, shrines, and religious buildings and included a 250-page account of “cultural life” in the city that described the city’s fairs and festivals, bazaars, and places for community gathering. Shortly after the book’s initial publication, Sayyid Khan presented a copy to A. A. Roberts, Delhi’s district magistrate and collector. Roberts, in turn, presented the book to the Royal Asiatic Society in London. On the suggestion of a member of the society, Roberts undertook an English translation of the book that for unknown reasons was never completed. In the preface to a later edition, however, Sayyid Khan claimed that the process of translating the work into English brought out “defects” in the original.

...

Put another way, the broader significance of the details recorded by Sayyid Khan—a significance that his British readership found missing— needed little elaboration for an Indian readership, since the mode of description he used established the context automatically. That context drew on an earlier tradition of IndoIslamic historical writing, in particular a mode Christopher Bayly has described as “genealogical.” This historiographic tradition assumed that certain known families and individuals embodied innate moral and spiritual qualities and that these qualities could be invoked for a reader simply by reciting lines of descent. More importantly, perhaps, the qualities did not need to be specified: Listing the names was enough to invoke them.

India's Search for Progressive Law

Sandipto Dasgupta, Columbia PhD of political science, gave a thought-provoking and lively talk on the Indian Constitution at my department this month. It was part of his long-term book project Legalizing the Revolution. He uses the important concept that critiques how legalism imposes linguistic constraints on the outcome, and thus makes law always backward-looking: precedence necessitates future decisions. Yet he argues that the Indian Constitution has a potential to become a more revolutionary document than other existing ones. It embodies transformative constitutionalism, termed by K. Klare in a 1998 essay, characterized as legally-driven empowerment and change. In South Africa, for example, readings of the Constitution focuses on issues such as "multiculturalism, close attention to gender and sexual identity, emphasis on participation and governmental transparency, environmentalism and the extension of democratic credentials into the ‘private sphere’."They are in contrast with contractual constitutionalism like the American and French Constitution, which has checks and balances as well as judicial review that prevents it from later turmoil. 

Land reform is one of the most important example regarding the Indian constitution's progressive status and interpretation. Dasgupta argues that this precedent made the later judicial activism through public interest litigation regarding environmental issues in the 1980s possible. Land reform was accepted as an important process to be implemented by the Congress Party when they come to power: on the one hand for the purpose of creative an equitable society in response to peasant movements, and on the other hand, for removing less productive feudal structures as part of the Modernization project.

Congress leaders also agreed that it should be compensative land reform, in which landowners would be compensated. Lawyers faced the problem of how to use it to implement the compensation: How much should the law compensate for land reform? The process is complex and one cannot tie it to one term because contexts vary. There was a consensus among the legal writers that there should be no qualifiers for “compensation” and that the local judiciary representatives should decide. There should have some coherent principle followed throughout the process, but it does not have to be good or just.

One example Dasgupta provided was the Bela Banerjee case. Her land was taken to resettle Partition refugees in Bengal in 1950. Yet Mrs. Banerjee only got compensation from the 1946 price, which has increased since. The Supreme Court declared that this act was unconstitutional because the word “compensation” implies just equivalence and should correspond with market value. I could not help but notice how this process was so much more calculated and technical than the impromptu tribunals in China's land reform that not only took away landowners land, but also in some cases executed them.

Dasgupta notes that this reform was not based on the notion that everyone has natural rights to property. My issue with this framework is the lack of foundation. If rights, such as right to land, are not absolute, the interpretation of them can go in many directions. The interpretive law can fall back on "Hindu" or "Islamic" custom like the British rulers, or it could be used for a progressive goal like land reform. This is the classic problem regarding constitutionalism in the U.S.: Interpretation v. Original Intent. I am not familiar with common law and the British probably have a different understanding based on their law; for example, while the U.S. Supreme Court may legalize gay marriage under the 14th amendment, the British law could have the same outcome with different legal reasoning. Yet I still think that one should have to have a clearer idea of what the ideology is when arguing for a progressive Indian constitution. 

Jawaharlal Nehru thought that writing better text could could help the political mandate of post-independence social justice and bypass conservative roadblocks, yet both Nehru and Dasgupta notes that the class status of lawyers was another issue new legal language could not bypass. Dasgupta quotes Nehru, the Indian constitution "has been purloined by lawyers." The parliament wanted to use legalistic language to mediate the process, but the parliament also has to cede the interpretation powers to lawyers or expert committees. Dasgupta is acutely aware of the question of interpretation under constitutionalism, and I look forward to reading analyses of central themes in Indian legal interpretation, perhaps with more case studies.

Race and Gender in Music

What is the boundary of a tradition or genre? Music grants creative license, and market forces are increasingly determining the success of musicians rather than politics expressed in the music. This creates problems such as cultural appropriation, and the clear solution is not yet to be found. Jazz started as a music genre that expressed black suffering and the African American experience. Nowadays it is often associated with upper-class taste and elevator music. Yet one also finds it hard to call for a purge in all elements that are inauthentic.
The politics of culture remains an important issue for the Indian diaspora in the Caribbeans, as Tejaswani Niranjana shows in her book Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. The diaspora faces the anxiety of trying to prove they are also adherents of “Indian culture,” which dangers on feeding into Orientalist interpretations of hierarchies of authenticity. Some migrants from India have treated caste as a personal ascription and adopted the styles of conduct to appear as a twice-born. Due to the disproportionate ratio of male to female migrants, caste endogamy to the extent of “back home” was almost impossible. This trend has led to people like controversial writer V.S. Naipaul to think of the diaspora in the Caribbean as “mimic men” and have not “produced anything.” Some of them have thus tried to show their continuance of (Hindu) tradition at home and racial similarity and create exclusionist cultural projects. The left in Trinidad thus faces problems of race, where colonialists and racial purists on both sides tried to maintain an antagonist position toward each other’s interests, despite working class similarities.

Derek Walcott responded in a momentous Nobel Prize speech that the Caribbean has always been looked in a way that it is "illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized." It stems from an expansionist idea that the Caribbeans across the ocean “is new, this is the frontier, the boundary of endeavor, and henceforth everything can only be mimicry.”[Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. 37.] Yet there is undue appreciation to the innovative uses of the mix in chutney-soca, with Trinidadian English as well as Bhojpuri Hindi being featured in explicit songs. In ways chutney-soca songs are more authentic, organic, and egalitarian than some other "traditional" Indian songs. As Walcott eloquently asked, why are these practices "not 'celebrations of a real presence'? Why should India be 'lost' when none of these villagers ever really knew it, and why not 'continuing'?"

Soca music events allows for many working class women to participate in festive cultural expression, even while incurring wrath from conservative commentators. There are many suggestive lyrics, such as those sung by the famous Drupatee, which have suffered the ignominy of vulgar or obscene. Others stated that "no Indian woman has any right to sing calypso."[Ibid. 112-3.] Racial purity, like caste purity, relies heavily on the circumscription of actions of a community’s women. Hindu opinions in Trinidad has are parallels with Confucian projects in China, such as the House of Female Virtue (女德馆) in which claims to tradition and cultural authenticity threaten female self-respect, freedom, and mobility. The question of gender is under-explored in the quest for authenticity. Trinidad provides a great ground for research since it carries many intersectional questions. Tejaswani Niranjana’s book is a great analysis for the politics of class, race and culture.

Fore more: see documentary on Calypso-Soca music, Jahaji Music

Inequality in the Business of Surrogacy

Carvings of men and women on Jagdish Temple, Udaipur. Photo credits: Adrian

Last month, Dr. Sheela Saravanan gave an excellent colloquium talk based on her research of commercial surrogacy in Gujarat. She highlighted the economic and legal inequality in these transactions. For example, Indian surrogates are not even given the copy of the contract and have little knowledge of the legal guidelines, while US surrogates have a choice over closed or open contract and choose the closeness of the ongoing relationship between her and the intended parents. The participants of the colloquium asked great questions, such as the role of doctors. Doctors have a lot of power to conduct this business and there seemed to be minimal regulation; there is still no authoritative data on the number of surrogate births in India. A Mumbai doctor in the business once even replied to Saravanan’s persistent questioning, “We are doing a favor for the mothers.” Another question asked the caste background of the surrogate mothers. One of the clinics Saravanan researched had a book of surrogate profiles for the intended parents to browse. In that book, most of the intended parents ask about religion and usually wanted mothers to be of the same religion. Furthermore, if the surrogate mother was a Brahmin, then she could receive more money. If one is better looking then one would also have higher chances of being chosen from the book. Yet this process does not occur in the reverse: the surrogate would not choose the parents or sometimes not even the number of fetuses inserted in her body.

Inequality between the global north and south pervades medical tourism. Indian film Ship of Theseus poses bioethics questions in one of the segment where an illegal organ trader poached a poor Indian man one of his kidneys. The organ trader provided it to man who needed a new kidney in Europe who knew nothing about the source. Later two Indian good Samaritans traced down the European man and questioned him about this problem. The European man coughs up more money for the man who lost a kidney, yet one of the Indians saw this act as an easy way for the European man to buy out of his guilt. The segment ends with the good Samaritans bringing the Indian man the money but still feeling ambivalent regarding the nature of the trade. Surrogates who sign up for money in the global south also are susceptible to deceit. The 10-minute documentary Mothers Anonymous shows that surrogates who give birth to twins or triplets may not always receive the promised compensation and have few legal channels of dispute. Saravanan noted in her paper on surrogacy that “Asymmetries of individual capacity (knowledge, contacts and financial capability) lead to trust amongst actors. This trusting process results in experiences that can either be positive or potentially exploitative.”

But the starkest aspect related to surrogacy among the many forms of medical tourism is the gender aspect. Many kinds of medical tourism arguably can become more transparent and legally regulated for both parties, but the gender issue of surrogacy will still remain a stickler: the social contract has been conveniently neutralizing patriarchy in legalese, and the same may happen to surrogacy. Sarvanan writes,

In her book, The Social Contract, Carole Pateman critiques the social contract theory and asserts that patriarchal control prevails in the marriage contract, the prostitution contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. She claims surrogacy contracts are the means by which women’s reproductive capacities are dominated and patriarchy is upheld. In Feminist Morality, Virginia Held regards the social contract theory as inadequate in representing children and women and in capturing the meaningful moral relationship between people.

Surrogates may read, understand and sign a surrogacy contract, but the contract would not signify the same amount of shame and guilt as for a person to read, understand and sign a contract for trading in his or her kidney. Cultural baggage is attached to surrogacy in the South Asian context. While some think that being a surrogate mother is fine for money in an otherwise a conservative society, with patriarchy in mind, I still found it hard to believe that women can ever pursue this chance in the open: understandably many work in collaboration with their husbands and immediate family to keep this as a secret. Another gender question: how does surrogacy threaten the social understanding and definition of motherhood? The surrogate mothers in the documentary feel emotion attachment to the babies, even though they are not genetically related. (In contrast, the popular trope regarding men is that they expect their offspring to be genetically “theirs.”) Women around the world face critiques that they are selling their wombs, which should somehow be regarded as a sanctified zone. Motherhood seems to mean legal ownership of the child, but in the case of surrogacy without the same amount of effort, which is so often labeled as “sacrifice.” The intended parent also may not experience the typical birth defining motherhood but still expects to enjoy all the experiences with “her” child thereafter.

Many surrogates rationalize their decision by citing their economic needs and contribution to family income, as seen in the documentary. This attitude poses is a stark contrast with another group of women who also earn money for their family in Pakistan. Zehran Yasmin Zaidi’s Chaddors and Pink Collars in Pakistan: Gender, Work, and the Global Economy shows in one chapter that oftentimes women can

participate in non-traditional employment outside of home, but requires women to observe cultural norms in non-work related matters. The dynamics of this process can be understood by examining how class and gender operate in Pakistan. Many women workers who were interviewed by the author came from working-class backgrounds, yet made contradictory claims about working out of choice rather than economic necessity.

But in both cases, women earn approval through bringing financial gains to the family despite the acts are against previous convention.

Unfortunately there was not a lot of anthropological data on the gender questions: who makes the decision to become surrogates in the family and what are the different opinions of the informed participants (e.g. Fathers, mothers, in-laws)? How does gender relations impact the surrogates’ economic “rationality?” The intentions are very elusive, compounded with layers of ethics and gender politics. I speculate that it is possible that both sides who are participating in this transaction would not even approve of this kind of deal when asked in a polling exercise.

Dialogue in the Dark, Hamburg

This May Day, I went to this museum called Dialogue in the Dark in Hamburg, Germany. Here, "visitors are

led by blind guides through a specially constructed and completely darkened space. Conveying characteristics of a familiar environment such as a park, a street or a bar, a daily routine turns into a new experience." This was not my idea but I have always been open to understand different lives. I went with 8 other people in a group who I just met that very day; it was a trust building experience with them as well as with our guide. I just started learning German so our group had an English-speaking guide, who went by the name Ray. He "showed" us his "car," which we had to guess the brand; his "door," where we had to find the doorbell; as well as his "boat," all simulated in the dark.

image from internet

In the end we chatted at the “cafe." He helped us identifying the coins and paying for the drinks and snacks. He could see 7%, has traveled overseas, and enjoys Chinese martial art films. He also learned Taekwondo as a hobby. He is  enrolled in university and uses learning aid (I have seen a couple of visually impaired students guided only by walking sticks at my own university campus as well). At one point he said that his parents were Turkish. This struck me that I was assuming he was German all the time and it revealed a lot about the differences in epistemology. So I asked how do visually impaired people judge others if they cannot see their appearances. Ray said that people like him usually respond positively to sounds that are warm and enthusiastic, which was exactly his kind of speech.

When it was time to say goodbye, I asked if we could see what he looked like. Ray joked that if we see anyone who looks like Johnny Depp it would be him. But in the end he wanted us to remember him as a blind person would remember a new person, and we did not see him. I shook hands with him instead.

I looked up his full name "Rasim" means the one who draws. It reminds me of this visually impaired artist John Bramblitt who painted extraordinary paintings with the help of other senses.

I expected to understand the experience of the blind and visually impaired. As a student of social sciences, we work with categories, such as class or race. The same applied for people with disabilities. But this experience showed that people are not defined exclusively by their most salient feature. It is a cliche to list the achievements that blind people have accomplished, but after this time, I realized that it is so true that one should not judge anyone based on their disability. After spending 90 min in the dark with simulated environments and a walking stick, I understood myself better. I am that I am. Even visual disability cannot change certain aspects of myself. This is not to say that gender, class, and race does not matter--Being from an educated family helps. I could imagine sexual assault would also be more of an issue for women-identifying visual impaired than the men. (See film "Night on Earth") Still, disability is only one aspect and does not decide one's life once and for all.

Law as Ideology

South Asian history really helps one understand the underlying factors shaping facets of life other social scientists take for granted. Our history class studied law in colonial South Asia for the first two weeks of the new spring semester. Prof. Ahuja provided the following insightful commentary. These avenues of historiography are incredibly ambitious and challenging. I have yet to fathom if one day I can accomplish work to this extent. The late C.A. Bayly's first two books supposedly took 12 years. I must be patient on the way.

There are four different attempts for assessing law in colonial India (South Asia). First, the British created a new law that was unrelated to previous practice. The British authority's sometimes halfhearted, sometimes full-hearted attempt to "solve" the issue of sati is one example.

The second approach shows a clash of legal cultures in which a dominant structure imposed by the British reinvents older structures. Bernard Cohn's Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge shows & critiques Orientalist William Jones' efforts to remove "accretions of bad practice," find the proper Indian practice, and compose a Roman counterpart of "Hindu law." 

The third approach is the subaltern one which argues that colonial dominance did not "stick" onto Indian society. As a consequence, colonial law was not accepted by the locals and had no legitimacy. 

The fourth approach, mostly consisted of historians from Cambridge, attempts to look at Indian society as the basis of colonial power but also with Indian actors who have agency. Radhika Singha's A Despotism of Law falls under this category. Lauren Benton also shows how Indian subjects use the law to further their own interests in Colonial Law and  Cultural  Difference. Lawmaking should be understood as a “cultural enterprise,” and the state is just one of the actors in a social field. Law is a form of ideology; dissecting it shows the interplay between ruling powers and dissent. For example, penal law was linked to ideology and the consolidation of British authority. The British actors had an interest in centralizing the faujdari courts, which did not have clearly designated jurisdictions before. Zamindars shared power with other Kshatriya clans in governing an area and had overlapping regions of authority. This was the case in most early modern societies: ruling power worked with contractors that raised revenue and run jails. When colonial power enters, it sees venality everywhere and critiques it. The colonial power's need for militarization motivates the process of bureaucratization and centralization, but also the moral urge to weed out "venality."

According to Prof. Ahuja, whenever there is a lot of "corruption" or nonviolent but notorious and "immoral" legal misconduct, it usually is hiding a) historical change; b) class formation; c) clash of interest and ethical norms. There is a change in legal thought when the British tried to stop the practice of Blood Money, in a murderer is punished through compensating the victim's family. The British saw murder as a public offense rather than just a problem between two interest parties. The standard for "valid evidence" also changes under British rule. But the previous practices are not totally eradicated. It is like animal-hide paper, which is written over again and again. The text written previously is still visible, albeit hard to distinguish. As a result, India's law is a complex structure shaped by diverse regional actors and imperial cultures. In conclusion: "Law presents itself as generalized ethical ideas that seem universal and timeless. But one should look at varying social forces and dig for [law's] historical roots."

Old Court House and Writers Buildings in Calcutta by Thomas Daniell, 1786. © British Library Board.