From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it challenges existing scholarship, showing how - far from being a system based on traditional values - Hindu law was developed around ideas of liberalism, and that this framework encouraged questions about equality, women's rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival sources, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organising principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.

"Social and religious reform in colonial India has often been written about without an effort to highlight the wide-ranging debates that affected it. The volume is thus the first work to focus on 'reform' as a disputed concept. It traces the critical contestations around the phenomenon of reform as it affected the largest community of British India - the Hindus. The essays identify major issues within the history of socio-religious reform that grew into passionate public debates."--BOOK JACKET.

The book is an anthology of research papers presented in various symposia and journals and define various facets of nationalism and social reform in a colonial situation. These essays also consider the antecedents of Indian nationalism within the colonial power structure as developed in the 19th century and early 20th century.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Part of the PHISPC series on modern Indian history, this volume provides an overview of the history of social, economic, and political thought prior to the development of disciplinary categories in social sciences.