Conclusion

Abstract

India, being a recipient of a largely forced legal transfer, necessarily suffers the issues of a gap between law and society. While measures have been taken to reduce this gap and achieve an ‘integrated’ approach to law, which attempts to take into consideration those indigenous forms of law that exhibit closer congruency with society, they continue to be top-down and state-centric. The broad implications of this study are to re-evaluate India’s common law identity, to question the applicability of ‘uniformalization’ in the Indian context, to examine how constitutionally recognized heterogeneity interacts with other constitutional ideals of national unity and integrity, and to examine the interact of regional and cultural safeguards with universal values of human rights.