Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8822-9231

Author Linked-In Account

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrith-bhargav-dr-44154273?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app

Date of Award

19-7-2025

Document Type

Thesis

School

School of Law

Programme

Ph.D.-Doctoral of Philosophy

First Advisor

Dr.R.Madhavan

Keywords

Legal History, Modernity, Local Dispute Resolution, Colonial Courts and Indian Lawyers, Knowledge and Power

Abstract

From the abstract idea of Dharma that enabled the practice and sustenance of local custom and usage, law was defined without verbiage but in meanings and understandings. In the colonial age, law was constantly being defined and codified not just textually, but through projects of economies of politics, knowledge and power in a way that their transactional metrics produced social and cultural genres that changed India forever. In that state of play, lawyers and their associated players contributed to the emerging culture of power and dominance with their tool of making the law through cases and mainstreamed the colonial legal system into the country’s corpus of cultural understanding and ways of perception.

Another strand of this journey is the setting up and the making of courts as institutions of law and justice, a process that created a new culture in colonial India. The work argues that the colonial courts became the sites of engineering versions of self-hood and identities, carved out of Indian social categories and the theatre of colonial rule was aptly supported and buttressed by the judicial system that was accepted and acceded to by the Indians in that phase of history. This legitimated courts as the institutional frameworks of receiving, dispensing and sounding out the metrics of colonial power and knowledge in the field of dispute resolution.

This works analyses this as a means to the end of formulating a culturally stimulating model of Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) that seeks to defuse the docket explosion that has alarmed the state of the Indian judiciary. To underscore this, there is a need to re-assess and re-affirm understandings of the colonial past and its strange manifestations in the legal psyche. If knowledge was a tool of colonial power, history is an instrument of uncovering the basis of that power as its content is demonstrative and deductive. The relationship between rights, power, knowledge, law and its factual matrices in Indian society are indubitably interwoven in the nuanced network of psychology. Litigation is a psychological process that adopts a legal genre for realisation of its purported potentialities. In that exercise of potentials, the seamless interaction of rights, power, knowledge, law and facts cast a spell of action and reaction that are processed through the portals of historical investigation.

This work also briefly mentions the comparative dimension on standpoints of legal tradition, colonial legacy, litigation culture, ADR Integration and role of modernity from Singapore and Japan as points of reference for comprehending the value of history in Asian frameworks of law and society. Singapore is notable for its handling of the colonial past and its rise a global financial nerve centre, while Japan with its transactions on inward and outward shifts of civilizational perception has shaped its own destiny as a technocrat promoter nation state.

The Constitution was a product of colonial struggle and accepted the inheritance of knowledge and power with little negotiation in its core psyche. This was transformational as the Constitution was both a manifesto and document for institutional governance. The Constitution later acquired a special status in the Indian imagination and interwove itself into the civilizational pantheon that is all accepting and embracing of identities and textual manifestations of ideas as the narrative that it holds. The journey of modernity affected India in the colonial era and this touched upon the institutions of the village and caste, which had relationships with society, that are beyond positivist meaning and comprehension.

The defiance of colonial logic and inimitable match of ideas that the colonialists subsumed in their statist pre-occupation with knowledge constituted their core in terms of authentic meaning and existence as living traditions and thus became elemental categories for an ordered society. This resulted in the individualisation of society that was constitutionally recognised and boosted for modernity’s engagement in Indian social workings.

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