Dharma, Law, and Individualism in the Age of Empire: Literature of the Colonized in British India

Abstract

In recent decades, the field of Law and Literature has increasingly drawn criticism from scholars for its exclusive focus on the Anglo-American canon and for its indifference to non-western texts anchored in other historical and cultural contexts. This, however, may not simply be a matter of oversight. If one were to extend the argument that postcolonial scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty and John and Jean Comoraff have made in the disciplines of History and Anthropology to the field of Law and Literature, one could contend that non-western literary texts and systems of thought have been seen as inconsequential because it has been assumed that western categories and western thought are universal and adequate for understanding the rest of the world. The non-West is viewed in the dominant scholarship simply as a passive recipient of western categories rather than as a space rich with multiple alternative systems of knowledge that could indeed be incompatible with western knowledge systems.