Friday, May 22, 2009

Special Issue: Personal Law, Identity Politics and Civil Society in Colonial South Asia

Indian Economic and Social History Review has a special double issue, "Personal law, Identity Politics and Civil Society in Colonial South Asia," co-edited by Eleanor Newbigin, Leigh Denault, and Rohit De (January/March 2009, Volume 46, No. 1). It explores the ways in which law provided a forum for the construction of new notions of gender, family and community relationships in South Asia. The articles treat law as a discursive framework that guides and sets the social templates through which Indian subjects were forced to interact with the colonial state.

Eleanor Newbigin, Leigh Denault, and Rohit De
Introduction: Personal law, identity politics and civil society in colonial South Asia

Erica Wald
From begums and bibis to abandoned females and idle women: sexual relationships, venereal disease and the redefinition of prostitution in early nineteenth-century India

Leigh Denault
Partition and the politics of the joint family in nineteenth-century north India

Mitra Sharafi
The semi-autonomous judge in colonial India: Chivalric imperialism meets Anglo-Islamic dower and divorce law

Eleanor Newbigin
The codification of personal law and secular citizenship: Revisiting the history of law reform in late colonial India

Rohit De
Mumtaz Bibi's broken heart: The many lives of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act