Iterations of Law Legal Histories from India by Aparna Balachandran

Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India advances new perspectives on legal history from South Asia. While earlier historians looked at the results rather than the performance of law, the contributors to this volume examine the socioeconomic and political contexts that shape law-making and its practice.
The chapters of this volume interrogate ‘from below’ the framing of legal regimes, and explore the physical and epistemic violence of colonial law. The contributors look at the ways in which colonized subjects shape the contours of legal spaces through constant interchange, conflict, and adjustment between the rulers and the governed.
The volume critically engages with not just archival material ranging from case law to legal treatises but also everyday records of rule to investigate the relationship between the discipline of history and the institution of law. It focuses on the complex moments in the life of the law when rights or claims simultaneously bring into existence a new economy of power and authority.