Presenters
Moran Arik - Department of Asian Studies, University of Haifa, Haifa, IsraelBallas Irit - Law Faculty, College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan, Israel
Panel
70 – State Law, Religious Identity, and Cultural Transformation: Hinduisation and Sanskritisation in the HimalayasAbstract
In the aftermath of the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814–1816), the British East India Company confronted a dilemma familiar across the Himalayas: how far state law should reach into intracommunity criminal matters. Archival correspondence from the Shimla Hills shows Company officials using the same perception of the people’s alterity to argue both for intervention (to impose public order) and against it (to preserve local norms and the community’s general will). This paradox resonates with wider Himalayan legal transformations, from the Mulukī Ain in Nepal to colonial policies in India, where codification sought to align legal principles associated with the sovereign with diverse local practices. The presentation will explore these entanglements by way of examples from the EIC archive and its ramifications for criminal justice in British India writ large.
