Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia

Contents: 1. Introduction/Michael R. Anderson and Sumit Guha. 2. Wrongs and rights in the Maratha country: antiquity, custom and power in eighteenth-century India/Sumit Guha. 3. Civil authority and due process: colonial criminal justice in the Banaras Zamindari, 1781-1795/Radhika Singha. 4. Sansiahs and the state: the changing nature of 'crime' and 'justice' in nineteenth-century British India/Sandria Freitag. 5. A vindication of the rights of woman? Families and legal change in nineteenth-century Malabar/G. Arunima. 6. Do changing conceptions of gender justice have a place in Indian women's lives? A study of some aspects of Christian personal laws/Archana Parashar. 7. Sex and punishment among mill-workers in early-twentieth-century Bombay/Radha Kumar. 8. Elusive social justice, distant human rights: untouchable women's struggles and dilemmas in changing India/R.S. Khare. 9. The ethics of struggle: changing political perceptions among secondary school students in a southern Sri Lanka/Jani de Silva. 10. Sectarianism and human rights discourse: the politics of human rights in the post-colonial Punjab/Pritam Singh. 11. From subject to citizen: towards a history of the Indian civil rights movement/Nilanjan Dutta. Index.

"In recent years, South Asia's legal history has attracted intense political debate. Contemporary controversies involving fundamental questions of governance and policy have turned on contested reconstructions of past legal arrangements. On the one hand various groups--including secularists, feminists and those endorsing divergent orthodoxies--have turned to historical evidence to support their visions of governance. On the other, every society in South Asia has been drawn into an international dialogue regarding putatively universal human rights in a socially heterogeneous world.

"In this lively and wide-ranging volume, an international team of contributors tackles highly controversial questions regarding legal procedure, forms of punishment, and the interaction of state and religious authorities. The issues extend from concepts of justice in pre-colonial Maharashtra to the ideas of Dalit women in Lucknow, and from women's rights and family law in Malabar to political strife in Punjab and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. Although the contributions are predominantly on India, they offer insights crucial to all other South Asian societies.

"This volume will be essential reading for all those interested in human rights law, religion and law, and the social and legal history of South Asia. Students, teachers, practitioners and professionals will all find much that is useful within these covers." (jacket)

[Michael R. Anderson is Director of Studies at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, London.

Sumit Guha is Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.]

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