Practitioners of the Law: Legal Professionals in British South Asia 1770-1870

The dissertation centers legal professionals to describe how law was shaped within the subordinate judiciary through their interactions and competition and the upward movement of these changes. The project shows how Indian legal professionals came to dominate colonial courts, overcoming British racial exclusion and hostility.

This dissertation is a history of Indian socio-legal development exploring the lives of legal professionals from the late eighteenth-century creation of English Supreme Courts to their merger with the Company’s Courts and transformation into High Courts in the mid-nineteenth century. It begins by describing the differences that arose from the diversity in patronage, education, and experiences in the colonial world. From there, it examines the administrative challenges faced by the colonial judiciary and how it enabled Indian legal professionals to enter a system that had previously sought to exclude them.

Through this history, the dissertation also explores what I call a “world of everyday law,” one operating at the level of district courts and below. It illustrates how this world differed from the more structured and organized arena of appellate and supreme courts. It was in this world that native legal professionals left their earliest and deepest marks. These professionals adjudicated over a hundred thousand petty cases annually while their British superiors dealt with a few thousand. Through this, they made the colonial system dependent on them and wary of alienating them, thus allowing them to blend British and Indian visions of law and, in the process, reshaping imperialism from below.

The latter half of the project shows how Indians infiltrated upwards through the judiciary and the growing importance of Indian law officers and lawyers in a system that was racially hostile to their presence. The dissertation concludes in the mid-nineteenth century; a time when Indians were barred from becoming military officers and had to give exams in England to enter Civil Service with no hope of rising to its apex. Yet, in the Judiciary, Indians could become judges in the highest courts in India, and Indian lawyers could argue as full co-equals of their English counterparts and were, in many cases, more successful.

To tell its stories, the dissertation draws on previously unexplored district court cases from Madras and reads them against sources from the Bombay High Court and the British Library’s India Office Records. It describes how the growing success of Indian legal professionals gave them the confidence to assert themselves to colonial authorities and how their increasing confidence eventually led to organized opposition and even strikes. The project aims to deepen our understanding of how power is negotiated and resisted within imperial polities and how the actions, ambitions, and agendas of legal professionals built modern systems of law.