A Genealogy of Personhood in Colonial Indian Law

My presentation will focus on two intertwined issues in the operation of colonial law in India: the legal recognition of ascriptive, embodied difference, which took shape primarily along the axes of gender and religion (with the operation of a system of ‘personal' law, in which subjects defined as Hindus or Muslims were governed according to colonial religious law in matters relating to the family), and the juridicization of the person, in the sense of the conceptualization of the person as the subject of rights (whether universal or differential). I will argue that colonial liberalism, like liberalism elsewhere, tended simultaneously toward a process of equalization or commensuration of politico-legal subjects, and to reinscribe corporeal difference. But more significantly, I will suggest that this tension structured the system of personal law itself: personal law, although based in the principle of legal recognition of social difference, was nonetheless premised on notions of human universality in a variety of ways. This legal formation, although a product of certain strands of liberalism, complicated the classical liberal model in which politically commensurate subjects confronted the implications of ascriptive difference only in the domain of social life. This latter model became the basis for a variety of claims to legal rights and recognition during the early twentieth century. Yet, the disjuncture it underscored between legal rights and actual social relations posed a critical political conundrum, in that legal equality did not eradicate social forms of marginality and subordination. Tracing the contradictory formations of colonial legal personhood, I argue that the question of the place of Indian social life and forms of bodily differentiation (e.g. religion, caste, gender) within the law structured colonial debates and political struggles in the early twentieth century and beyond, and produced a variety of creative engagements with the conundrums of legal recognition.