Description
The immediate decades prior to 1858 present a peculiar liminal period in South Asia during which the Mughal Empire, East India Company (EIC), and British Crown coexisted in a hybridised international order. Against this backdrop, this paper utilises the emerging colonial courtrooms as a microcosm to discern how law was deployed to create institutional patterns for mediating change within the regional order. Since the determination of legal codes and jurisdictional boundaries were matters inextricably connected to who constitutes the rightful sovereign, competing visions of law emerged as the primary battleground between these three distinct actors. I argue that within such jurisdictional contestations, an emerging professional class of native vakeels (lawyers) were instrumental in navigating the resultant legal labyrinth, eclectically relying on legal arguments based on Hindu, Muslim, and English common law; Burkean notions of “ancient constitution”; and law of nations to embed strategic interpretations of the rights of conquered populations. The seemingly quotidian preoccupations of the native litigant regarding transfer of deeds, quarrels about inheritance, and forging of promissory notes threw open and intensified broader nineteenth-century contestations around the nature and legitimacy of (corporate) sovereign actors in the international system.
