One of the major challenges for Indian legal historians has been to try and understand the legal systems of pre-colonial India. For a variety of reasons, there are no surviving central court archives or large documentary repositories that scholars of Ottoman Turkey and China have drawn upon. There is some awareness of legal treatises and codes but it remains debatable the extent to which they were actually applied in everyday life or formed a part of legal consciousness. In a recent article, Donald Davis and John Nemec turn to medieval literary texts and story collections to trace the ways “law is experienced and interpreted by specific individuals as they engage, avoid or resist the law”. The texts include Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (The River of Kings) and Somdeva’s Kathasagar (Ocean of Stories). Departing from formal studies of law and literature in medieval India, which have tried to see how far literature departs from the Dharmasastras, this article (and what I hope is a larger project) argues that in the absence of court texts and narrative legal sources, literary narratives become important sites to understand how legal ideas could be deployed and received.
A mass movement led by students has ushered in a new dawn in Bangladesh. What began as a claim for reform of the quota system transformed into a national movement to oust Bangladesh’s long-standing...
A mass movement led by students has ushered in a new dawn in Bangladesh. What began as a claim for reform of the quota system transformed into a national movement to oust Bangladesh’s long standing...
A mass movement led by students has ushered in a new dawn in Bangladesh. What began as a claim for reform of the quota system transformed into a national movement to oust Bangladesh’s long-standing...
A fortnightly feature inspired by I-CONnects weekly What’s New in Public Law feature that addresses the lacuna of a one-stop-shop public law newsletter in the Indian legal space. What’s new at...
[As part of our New Scholarship section, we have been inviting discussants to respond to the public law-themed articles featured in Volume 5 the Indian Law Review. You can access all the posts in...