Naveen Kanalu

The article examines the legal debates surrounding the construction of custom and customary law during British colonial rule in India in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Explaining the nature of legal transmission, I analyze the theoretical arguments behind John Austin’s and Henry Sumner Maine’s assessment of law as the “command of the sovereign”. Describing the colonial administrative attempts at codifying customary laws in the Indian sub-continent, I argue that two strands of thinking dominated this process. One, prevalent in the late eighteenth century, was the conception of codification in the civil legal tradition of creating “digests” from premodern sources of Hindu and Muslim jurisprudence. While another position that became predominant in the nineteenth century emphasized the codification of actual customary practices derived from anthropological studies and surveys of regions the British conquered such as the Punjab. In both cases, I critically evaluate the epistemological issues inherent to colonial discourse, which were sustained by a distinct conception of premodern sovereignty in India. These ideas of customary law not only operated through the logic of colonial discourse but also found their space within the larger framework of jurisprudence, law, and political authority in nineteenth century European thinking on codification.

The essay elaborates on the manuscript tradition of transmission, commentary, and glossing of fiqh or "Islamic jurisprudence" texts in medieval and early-modern juridical culture from the Indian sub-continent. Premodern Muslim jurists composed doctrinal treatises primarily in Arabic, the shared theological language of the 'ulamā' or "learned scholars". However, in the Indian context, Persian too had acquired the status of a language of Islamic law. From the fourteenth century, fatāwā compilations were made in Persian. By seventeenth-century Mughal rule in northern India, sharḥ or "commentary" and ḥāshiya or "super-commentary" in Persian were deployed as a mechanism for pedagogical transmission. Analyzing two extant Persian manuscripts pertaining to the Ḥanafī madhhab or "school" of juridical thought, Fatāwā-i fīrūzshāhī (fourteenth century) and 'Abd al-Ḥaqq Sajādil Sirhindī's Sharḥ-i hidāya (seventeenth century), the essay appraises the nature of textual and manuscript practices involved in generating Islamic juridical norms and practices. Examining philological and textual features exhibited internal to these two texts, I argue that fiqh doctrinal writing in the age of post-classical Islamic sciences (twelfth to eighteenth Centuries) had become "hybrid" in style. Rather than indicating tendencies towards a phase of "decline" due to "orthodox" adherence to tradition, such texts of legal genre portray a complex culture of Islamic law-making in the premodern period.

The article explores themes in the construction of a literary culture in old Kannada through a critical appreciation of the Sāhasabhīmavijayam (The Victory of the bold Bhīma), also known as the Gadāyuddham (The Battle of Mace) ― an epic poem composed in the campū style (a mixture of prose and poetry) by the poet Ranna (b. 949 AD). Ranna is one of the early Kannada poets belonging to what is known as the Jaina era. Ranna, who is counted among the Ratnatraya or the three jewels (the other two being his predecessors Pampa and Ponna) is known for the two extant kāvyas: the Ajitatīrthakarapurāṇatilakam, which is a hagiography of the second Jaina tīrthaṅkara, Ajitanatha, and more so for the work under consideration. In this kāvya, the dominant theme is the battle of mace between the hero Bhīma (who is compared to the poet's patron king Irivabeḍaṅga Satyasraya of the Kalyana Calukya dynasty) and his opponent Duryodhana. However, what is interesting is the Simhāvalokanakrama (the principle of the lion's backward glance) that the poet designates to his own style, whereby he intends to narrate the sequence of events and conflicts leading to the Mahābhārata war within the charged up atmosphere and tension that emerges in the battle of the two princes - treating the subject retrospectively while proceeding with it. Illustrating the way the vernacular has been in contestation with High Sanskrit culture in pre-modern Kannada literature, Ranna's work reinvents the nature of the Mahābhārata through its dense narrative structure. The work is unique both in terms of its technique and its narrative style, recounting the past, which reemerges at various instances, and thus exploring the powerful nature of the whole epic through the intensity of the Mahābhārata war. It gives priority to raudra rather than vīra rasa throughout - to paint a savage and violent nature of war. The poet tackles the conflict between Bhīma, his hero, and Duryodhana, his opponent, as the war is transformed into a duel between the two. It is this duel that sustains the epic from the beginning, retelling the preceding events that generate a recurrent idea of destiny at each stage, culminating in the end, which is also the beginning of Ranna's text. This text helps situate the kind of interactions between Sanskrit based high culture and that of the evolving tradition in Kannada. The development of mārga or the way within the regional/ local language is attested by the multiple ways in which the poet negotiates with the Sanskritic mārga on the one hand and on the other, the dēsi or the local poetic idiom readily available to him. In a few places, he translates verses from the Sanskrit play, the Veṇīsaṃhāra of Bhatta Narayana, however by re-placing them in a very different context. Nevertheless, what is significant is the invention of a poetic idiom that uses local and regional references, ideas, metaphors and aesthetic feelings - which would not find place within the Sanskritic poetics. Ranna, like his predecessor Pampa, who is conscious of inventing a mārga for Kannada, provides rich textual material to explore the literary, discursive and linguistic practices that nascent Kannada literary world acquires from the 9th century onwards. In this process, Ranna's Sāhasabhīmavijayam weaves a rich tapestry full of the plural ways of shaping and forming of a literary idiom. In the present article, I analyse the narrative structure of the kāvya and the way it proceeds internally in the sequential order. Next, I explore issues concerning the hero of the epic poem and the portrayal of the three main characters - Bhīma, Duryodhana and Draupadī. After exploring the problematic of the dominant rasa, I elaborate on some of the linguistic and literary particularities of the epic poem, especially in relation to the question of the mārga/ dēsi. In the final section, I illustrate a few examples of Ranna's adaptation of verses from the Veṇīsaṃhāra, before concluding with some general observations.

The workshop aims to analyse the relation between norms and practices in Islamic legal documentation. From a comparative perspective, it seeks to bring out similarities and explain divergences between different Islamicate empires where Islamic law prevailed. Why and how did the same legal doctrine produce such varied results in the documentary practices relating to private and public, commercial and fiscal activities within these vast regions? It addresses how the legal doctrine of different schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, etc.) was implemented by legal authorities to shape normative practices in diverse circumstances.

From this perspective, the workshop brings together scholars working on different regions of the Islamicate world: Africa, Middle East, India and Central Asia. It opens a field of dialogue between the historiographies of Islamicate empires and their documentary sources in several languages: Arabic, Persian and Turkish. The examination of norms alongside practices provides an opportunity to ask new theoretical questions, explore archival approaches as well as offer comparative interpretations of the historical application of legal doctrine in the premodern Islamicate world. The case studies raise several questions on the specific uses of law according to the socio-economic circumstances as well as the place of casuistry, and more generally, the theoretical analysis of law.