68 – Embedded Ownership: Tracing Indic Property Notions Across History

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H15
While Roman property law continues to inform modern legal systems, its counterpart in classical Hindu jurisprudence (Dharmaśāstra)—which shaped legal practice across premodern Southern Asia—remains primarily the domain of historians and philologists. Despite significant transformations under colonialism, concepts from Indic property theory, such as svāmin (owner), adhikāra (authority), dhana (wealth), bhoga (possession), and svātantrya (independence), have continued to shape vernacular political and religious discourses over time. This panel aims to delineate the historical trajectories and local inflections of this Indic vocabulary of ownership across diverse historical, regional, and linguistic contexts, particularly through the dialectics of scholastic norms and local legal practices. For the purposes of this panel, property is broadly conceived as a discursive field where relationships between people (authority, rights, claims) and between people and their environment (things, places, non-human agents like deities or animals) are negotiated—a process through which fundamental ontological and cultural categories such as personhood, lordship, autonomy, gender, sovereignty, wealth, and objecthood are articulated or produced. The panel invites contributions exploring these embedded notions of property and ownership, engaging with, but not limited to, the following themes: • Theoretical formulations on ownership and property in scholastic traditions such as Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya, or Dharmaśāstra. • Property regimes and documentation in regional legal cultures from the medieval and early modern periods. • The interaction of property theory with socio-economic structures, including household, gender, caste, labor, and religious institutions. • The criteria determining ownership: who is entitled to own, what is considered subject to ownership, and the ideologies underpinning these distinctions. • The transformation of Indic property theories through changing modes of production or encounters with Islamicate or Western legal traditions.

Convenor

Simon Cubelic

Presentations

The Incidents of Ownership in Hindu-Buddhist India, Java, and Bali
Lubin Timothy - Department of Religion, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, United States
The Metaphysics of Debt in early modern India
Wright Samuel - Plaksha University, Plaksha University, Mohali, India
The renouncers’ properties
Christof Zotter - Research Unit "Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal", Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Heidelberg, Germany
Sacred Trusts and State Law: Guṭhī Property in Nepal’s Ain of 1854
Cubelic Simon - South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Women, Grammar, & the Law
Li Charles - Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Tree Clearers and Tax Pioneers: ‘Kut’ and ‘Jama’ Land in East Central Indian Villages.
SENGUPTA SOHINI - TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, MUMBAI, India
Fluid Lands: Possession and properrty in the forest fringes of central India
Ratnam Maya - Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India