As scholars across a range of disciplines have observed, the process of decolonization in South Asia has been long and uneven—in significant part due to the persistence of the legal, administrative, and judicial institutions that were inherited from the British colonial state. This session examines the significance of these continuities between colonial and postcolonial laws and public institutions in South Asia. To what extent, if any, was decolonization a moment of rupture? How did colonial laws and legal institutions survive the formal end of colonial rule and how have postcolonial states in South Asia adopted and adapted them? And with what contemporary implications and consequences? The panelists will investigate law in colonial and postcolonial South Asia by looking both horizontally across imperial space and vertically across historical time. The speakers bring to the session interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from law, history, political science, and postcolonial studies.
Business meeting at program conclusion.