The Procrustean Bed of Colonial Laws: A Case of the British Empire in India

The Anglicization of law in the British Empire was primarily based on the perceived primitiveness of the native laws and the superiority of the modern British legal system. Maintaining the South Asian ‘identity’ of the law, while distancing the law from the community it belonged to, the British used procedural mechanisms to tilt the jurisprudence towards the Anglo direction. Procedural justice is often considered as the last bastion of a means to just and equitable practices; this paper hopes to expose the dark sides of the procedural mechanisms that succeeded in helping the British gain control over the Indian polity, through a contrast of the pre-colonial legal systems of India against the British legal interventions. Historical accounts of post-colonial legal systems suffer from, what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls, the “first in Europe, then elsewhere” structure of historical time,1 ignoring in entirety the pre-colonial identity of the subaltern. Such historicist arguments lead to a characterization that Indians were not yet civilized to govern themselves. To overcome these characterizations, the possibilities are twofold: first, to demonstrate how the natives were not in fact uncivilized as the colonial powers claimed, thus delegitimizing the colonial attempts to civilize; second, to demonstrate how the attempts to civilize were in fact a means to subordinate the natives, rendering inconclusive the narrative that portrays a “practical European” nature against a “mythical-religious Orient”.2 The exploration of these two possiI.