Biographies of Participants
Cassie ADCOCK (Assistant Professor of South Asian
Studies and Religious Studies, Washington University ), cadcock@artsci.wustl.edu
Visit http://artsci.wustl.edu/~relst/adcock.htm
Saku AKMEEMANA (World Bank) 
sakmeemana@worldbank.org
Aitzaz AHSAN (Counsel for Chief Justice of Pakistan) aitzaz_ahsan@hotmail.com
Aitzaz Ahsan is a Barrister-at-Law, Senior Advocate of the Supreme
Court of Pakistan and a member of the National Assembly of Pakistan
and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party.
He is also a member of the Law, Justice and Foreign Affairs Committees
of the National Assembly.
He is the author of several publications including: The Indus
Saga and the Making of Pakistan, Oxford University Press (1996);
Indian edition, The Indus Saga: From Pataliputra to Partition,
was published by Rolibooks, India (2005); Sindh Sagar: Aur Qyam-e-Pakistan (Urdu)
Dost Publications (1999); Divided by Democracy, co-authored
with Lord Meghnad Desai, Roli Books, India (2005).
Sumudu ATAPATTU (Associate Director, Global Legal
Studies Center , University of Wisconsin Law School) saatapattu@wisc.edu
Sumudu Atapattu teaches international environmental law at the UW
Law School and has a PhD from University of Cambridge , UK . She has
considerable experience in teaching, research and advocacy in Sri Lanka
as well as in the South Asian region. Her book on Emerging Principles
of International Environmental Law was published by Transnational
Publishers, New York in November 2006.
Sukanya BANERJEE (Associate Professor
of English, UW-Milwaukee) banerjee@uwm.edu
Sukanya Banerjee is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her areas of research include postcolonial
studies, nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and studies
of transnationalism and diaspora. She has been interested in the relationship
between law, narrative, and citizenship, especially across the 19 th-c.
British Empire , and her book Imperial Citizens: Nation, Empire,
Narrative, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
N. Gerald BARRIER (Professor Emeritus of History,
U. of Missouri-Columbia)
barriern@missouri.edu
Professor Barrier has written several articles and chapters on Sikhs
and how the political and legal frameworks of colonial and now post-colonial
Punjab/India have framed self-image and political mobilization. Areas
discussed include personal law, and also how symbols such as turbans,
kirpans, have been approached (historically and also in a N. American
context, before and after 9/11). One of his most notable articles in
this respect is a detailed chapter in Baird, Religion and Law in
Independent India, and his article on the Fairfax Viriginia Gurdwara
Case in Barrier and Pashaura Singh, eds. Sikh Identity. He
was an expert in several gurdwara cases, and worked with the INS on
other cases. Visit http://history.missouri.edu/people/barrier.html
Srimati BASU (Associate Professor of Gender and
Women’s Studies and Anthropology, University of Kentucky ) srimati.basu@uky.edu
Professor Basu’s research thus far has been primarily on issues
of property, marriage, law and women's access to resources, the interpellation
of nation, gender, and popular culture. Her fields of interest include
feminist jurisprudence, legal anthropology, development, violence against
women.
She has been working for the last few years on a new project, a cross-cultural
and comparative ethnography of family courts and mediation processes.
This project follows from her interest in the fate of feminist reforms,
and also allows her to examine questions of power and discourse, the
postcolonial legal subject, family and kinship, customary dispute resolution
systems, as well as delving into core theoretical issues of feminist
jurisprudence and development. Some topics include: juxtaposing theory
on rape and marriage, legal pluralism and domestic violence, mediation
and governmentality, trajectories of managing violence. She is now
working to bring it together as a book project provisionally entitled Managing
Marriage. Visit
http://www.uky.edu/AS/WomenStudies/New/faculty/basu.html
Sharif BHUIYAN (Associate, Dr Kamal Hossain and
Associates, Bangladesh and Advocate, Supreme Court of Bangladesh) sharif.bhuiyan@gmail.com
Dr Bhuiyan is an advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh and
specializes in international law and WTO law. He earned his LLM and
PhD Degrees from University of Cambridge , UK and was a visiting fellow
at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Cambridge in 2006
and a lecturer at the Department of Law, University of Dhaka in 2000.
His book entitled National law in WTO Law: Effectiveness and Good
Governance in the World Trading System was published recently
by the Cambridge University Press.
Arudra BURRA (JD student at Yale and PhD student
in philosophy at Princeton )
aburra@Princeton.EDU, arudraburra@yahoo.co.in
Arudra Burra is a JD student at the Yale Law School
, and a PhD student in the philosophy department at Princeton . His interests
in philosophy are in moral, political, and legal philosophy, broadly
speaking. His dissertation is on the concept of exploitation, and how
it relates to other concepts such as coercion and blackmail. His
interests in South Asia are primarily in legal history, particularly
around the transfer of power. At present he is studying the conflicts
between the Supreme Court and the first Indian Parliament leading up
to the enactment of the First Amendment Act of 1951. How did these two
institutions conceive of the constitution, of their role in interpreting
it, and of each other? The question is particularly interesting because
the membership of this first Parliament was identical to that of the
Constituent Assembly - which had, in its deliberations on issues such
as the right to property, explicitly voiced concerns about the power
of judicial review. Where fundamental rights were concerned, why did
the Court choose to exercise judicial review with respect to matters
such as property and freedom of speech, but not, say, to preventive detention?
He would like to work further on the early history of the Supreme Court,
in particular to explore the sorts of influences - from English and American
law - that animated many of its early opinions. Here again he is curious
about the interaction between a highly Anglicized legal tradition (manned
by completely Anglicized judges) and a political vision that emphasized
sloughing off the colonial past.
Sreeparna CHATTOPADHYAY (Assistant Professor, Anthropology
and Social Change and Development, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay) chattops@uwgb.edu
Prof. Chattopadhyay’s paper, entitled “Who cares about dead women?” is
part of a larger dissertation project examining marital violence in Mumbai.
It describes some of the challenges involved in doing fieldwork in the archives
of the Indian judicial system. While the first part of the study focuses on
unreported cases of non-dowry related marital violence in a slum community
in north-eastern Mumbai, the second half focuses on reported cases of domestic
violence using the archives of the Bombay City , Civil and Sessions court.
After a long struggle gaining access to information that is essentially part
of the public domain, she managed to secure 40 case files and 790 reported
cases of domestic violence.
The analysis of these documents reveals several critical and disturbing issues
with respect to the practice of this law. It highlights the ways in which the
judiciary invalidates women’s claims of violence through sometimes overt
means such as active discouragement of reporting, the bungling of investigations
either through negligence or the deliberate sabotage of cases, and even through
covert and sinister means involving the subtle art of words, speech and language.
Legal discourse pertaining to domestic violence cases attempts to construct
specific versions of events using language that undermines the ‘violence’ in
domestic violence, painting a benign picture of marital violence, while retaining
discourses on kin obligations, sanctity of the family, etc. Prof. Chattopadhyay’s
reading of these materials employs both a feminist and a deconstructive approach
so as to locate the means of silencing victims of domestic violence in the
Indian jurisprudence. Visit http://www.uwgb.edu/scd/
Ruchi CHATURVEDI (Visiting Assistant Professor at Smith
College , Dept of Anthropology)
rc355@columbia.edu
Professor Chaturvedi’s research revolves around the nearly decades
long period (from late 1970s to early 2000s) of political violence between
local-level workers of different political groups in North Kerala . The key
protagonists of this violence have been workers of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) (CPM), and the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (RSS)
and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In district and higher courts they have been
charged with crimes ranging from murder, attempt to murder and criminal intimidation.
Drawing upon fieldwork amongst these local level political workers, she ethnographically
examines the impasse of moral and discursive orders generated by the practice
of political violence in the liberal democracy that India aspires to be. She
describes the political workers as members of close-knit, fraternal communities
of friends and fellow workers and as constituents of political formations anchored
on revolutionary and radical ideologies. Impelled by these contexts, they not
only announce the efficacy and necessity of violence in politics but also acknowledge
their own participation in it. As citizens of a liberal democracy, they disavow,
often in the same instance, their own culpability as well as the practice of
violence itself.
Rohit DE (PhD candidate
in legal history, Princeton ) de.rohit@gmail.com
Rohit’s primary area of interest is in examining how law and legal
institutions in South Asia act as sites for the creation and transformations
of identity. His previous research has dealt with the codification of Islamic
law in India , Pakistan and Bangladesh .
He is also interested in examining how this transition from subjecthood to
citizenship is handled before the postcolonial courts. Since the nation finds
expression as a legal entity, he seeks to understand the role the post-independence
Supreme Court played in creating a united nation state and in linking independent
India to the legal inheritance of colonial India . Using precedents from colonial
cases, the courts in independent India gave new life to older debates over
rights and identities.
Donald R. DAVIS Jr . (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Languages
and Cultures of Asia , UW-Madison)
drdavis@wisc.edu
Don Davis, Jr. is Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Cultures
of Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison. On Oct.11, he is hosting the meeting
of contributors to Law and Hinduism: an Introduction, a volume edited
by him, Jay Krishnan, and Timothy Lubin. Visit
http://lca.wisc.edu/facstaff/faculty/davis.htm
Victoria FARMER ( Assistant Professor, Political
Science and International Relations SUNY-Geneseo) farmer@geneseo.edu
Professor Farmer is a South Asianist trained as a political scientist. She
wrote her dissertation ( University of Pennsylvania ) on media policy in India
, focusing on the legal and administrative governance of Indian television
(Doordarshan). She is currently embarking on two publishing projects: (1) a
book on comparative media policies of the states of South Asia ; and (2) an
article on legislative issues in India regarding governance of media, freedom
of information, and consumer protection. Visit
http://www.geneseo.edu/academic_depts/index.php?pg=PlSc&content=facultyy.php
Allison FISH (PhD candidate in legal anthropology, UC-Irvine) afish@uci.edu
Allison is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department
of Anthropology at the University of California , Irvine . Her dissertation research
focuses on the practice of yoga both within and outside of India for commercial
exchange. She is particularly interested in understanding how different parties,
from individual gurus to international corporate yoga schools to the Indian central
government, are using commercial tools such as intellectual property claims and
the franchise form to control the global circulation of yogic knowledge.
In the past five decades, cosmopolitan consumers particularly in the United
States , Europe , Japan , and Australia , who are attracted to indigenous and
orientalized cultural artefacts and knowledge, have created a market demand
for the South Asian spiritual practice of yoga. This demand for a commercialized
yoga has shaped a new and profitable transnational market space that, in 2004
in the US alone, generated more than $30 billion. In the last ten years this
industry, due in part to its increasing value, has been subject to escalating
informal and formal regulatory activity by private actors, interest groups,
and state institutions. By using a case study of recent IP claims to yoga,
Allison’s research examines how contemporary cultural practices are subject
to contestation and reconfiguration by complex interactions between private,
legal, corporate, and state actors. Her analysis explores how the practice
of South Asian yoga is becoming the subject of globally franchised businesses
and how this phenomenon provides a space for the innovative application and
extension of IP management tools by different parties attempting to place a
tradition either in the public or private domain.
Marc GALANTER ( John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law
and Professor of South Asian Studies, UW-Madison and London School of Economics) galanter@law.wisc.edu
Professor Galanter is a leading US-based authority on contemporary Indian
law. He is the author of Law and Society in Modern India (1989), Competing
Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (1991) and other works
on the Bhopal disaster, legal pluralism, the legal profession, and informalism
(lok adalats/nyaya panchayats) in India . His most recent book is Lowering
the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture. Visit
http://law.wisc.edu/faculty/biog.php?iID=276 and http://marcgalanter.net/
Shubha GHOSH (Professor of Law, Southern Methodist University
(SMU) Dedman School of Law) sghosh@mail.smu.edu
Professor Ghosh’s research looks at responses to international pressures
to expand intellectual property protection in India . Since the ratification
of the TRIPS Agreement in 1994 and the establishment of the World Trade Organization,
intellectual property has been the foremost issue in developing countries like
India . The justification for such interest has been in the role of strong
intellectual property rights as a key ingredient of the rule of law agenda
and the promotion of stable economic and market systems. There are several
levels to conducting research on this topic. The first level is identifying
the political and legal institutions that adapt to the pressures of adopting
formal legal protections for intellectual property. The second level is identifying
the industrial and market changes that are the result of changes in intellectual
property law. The third level is tracing the popular response to the pressures
on intellectual property reform. Prof. Ghosh’s work on traditional knowledge
and intellectual property has identified some of the doctrinal and institutional
responses to the threatened appropriation of traditional knowledge by intellectual
property owners. He situates these responses in the broader theoretical framework
of the development of global civil society. Visit http://www.law.smu.edu/faculty/facdetail.aspx?ID=51
Rebecca GRAPEVINE (PhD candidate, Department of History,
U. of Michigan )
rrgrapevine@comcast.net
Rebecca’s research has focused on the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. She
has argued that during the debates on the Act in the Lok Sabha, at least two
competing discourses of citizenship were deployed, one which privileged the
idea of a universal citizenship and one which located Hindu women’s legal
rights in their past and future service to the nation. Hindu women’s
relationship to the state was conceptualized through a politics of conjugality
and the home. In the future, she plans to examine legislative debates on the
Indian Citizenship Act (also 1955) as well as judicial decisions involving
gender and citizenship. A project she has developed addresses early 1950s judicial
interpretations of Articles 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution to argue that
by the time the Hindu Marriage Act came up for serious debate in 1954 and 1955,
the judicial groundwork for separate personal laws had already been laid. One
theoretical issue she is interested in exploring further is the concept of
the State as a monolithic, singular actor in light of differing judicial and
legislative approaches to religion and gender in India .
Sumit GUHA (Professor of History, Rutgers University ) sguha@history.rutgers.edu
South Asia has long been characterized by great diversity of legal forms
and usages that were often accommodated by governing authorities, sometimes
ignored and sometimes attacked. Nonetheless, the parallels between some present-day
patterns of conflict resolution and dispute settlement with those found in
the historical records of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is striking,
despite the colonial and post-colonial government's long-running efforts to
install a "modern" legal regime that would make recourse to such
fora both impossible and unnecessary. It suggests that institutions reflect
not the survival of traditions but contemporary realities of power in 'soft
states'. Visit
http://history.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=159&Itemid=140
Kusha HARAKSINGH (Head, Department of History and Associate
Fellow, Institute of International Relations, University of the West Indies) kharaksingh@fhe.uwi.tt
Dr. Kusha Haraksingh (LLB London, PhD SOAS, Barrister, Lincoln ’s Inn
) is Head, Department of History and Associate Fellow, Institute of International
Relations , at the University of the West Indies , Trinidad . His research
interests include the intersection of Indian legal traditions with western
law in the context of the Asian Diaspora which emerged out of nineteenth-century
indenture. In public life Dr. Haraksingh has been a member of the Trinidad & Tobago
Parliament, chairman of several state-run companies, and is the Lead Negotiator
for the Caribbean on legal trade issues. His research interest here is the
jurisprudence of world trade as it affects small developing countries.
Jim JAFFE (Professor of History, UW-Whitewater) jaffej@uww.edu
Professor Jaffe’s research examines the history of arbitration in South
Asia . In his book, The Limits of Justice and Fairness: Expanding the
Scope of Arbitration in Britain and India during the Late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries, he discusses the manifold social and economic changes
occurring throughout Britain and the sclerotic condition of the English court
system that together spawned significant interest in the expansion of arbitration
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Blackstone was only
one of a number of important jurists at the time who heaped praise upon the “infinite
importance” of these “peaceable and domestic tribunals” of
arbitration that avoided “the inevitable delay and expense of public
litigation.” As Bernard Cohn suggested, the empire was often used as
a laboratory for reforms intended for use at home. However, the manifest failures
of arbitration in two cultures, both at home and abroad, suggest that the weaknesses
of arbitration as an alternative method of dispute resolution ran much deeper
than that, at least during this important and formative period. Visit http://www.uww.edu/cls/directory/jaffe_james.html
Beatrice JAUREGUI (PhD candidate in anthropology, University
of Chicago )
bea@uchicago.edu
Beatrice is currently engaged in research for her dissertation, with the
tentative title, “Little Tyrants and Faulty Tools: Policing and Democratic
Order in Contemporary India.” Her general research interests center upon
legality, legitimacy, concepts of participatory democracy, and application
and enforcement of the law. At the 36th Annual Conference on South Asia , she
will be presenting a paper titled “Policing in India : Exploitation of
the Law or an Ethics of Illegality?” as part of a panel, “ Labors
of Legality and Illegality: Corruption, Goondas, and Politics in India and
Nepal .” It will be based on sixteen months of field work in Uttar Pradesh,
studying the everyday lives of police officers. She argues that due to a variety
of political, professional and personal pressures and structural inequities,
law enforcement personnel often perceive their normative extra-legal or illegal
activities not as matters of law or legality, but rather as necessary to “carry
out their duty” and “survive the system”. By analyzing a
variety of types of behaviour justified as management techniques in a larger
political order that disallows adherence to rational law, she hopes to provoke
new ways of thinking about legal governance, politics and social order that
do not rely on over-determined and imprecise categories like “corruption,” “brutality” and “abuse
of power.”
Laura JENKINS (Associate Professor of Political Science,
University of Cincinnati )
laura.jenkins@uc.edu
Professor Jenkins’ research interests include reservation policies
and the politics of legally classifying Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes
and Other Backward Classes, which she has written about in a few articles and
her book, Identity and Identification in India. She is now following
recent policy and legal developments expanding or limiting reservations in
higher education, which will be the subject of her Fulbright project in India
next year. Personal law is another research and teaching interest (see her
teaching case on Shah Bano at http://oz.uc.edu/thro/shahbano/index.htm).
She is also interested in laws relating to religious conversions (both colonial
and post-colonial). Visit
http://www.polisci.uc.edu/Faculty/faculty.html or
http://www.polisci.uc.edu/CV/jenkinscv.PDF
Anil KALHAN (Visiting Assistant Professor, Fordham Law School
) Kalhan@law.fordham.edu
Anil Kalhan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Fordham Law School.
Before coming to Fordham, he was an Associate in Law at Columbia Law School,
and he previously served as a litigation associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen
& Hamilton and co-coordinator of the firm's immigration and international human
rights pro bono practice group. He also has previously worked for the ACLU
Immigrants' Rights Project in New York and served as law clerk to the Hon.
Chester J. Straub (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) and the Hon.
Gerard E. Lynch (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York).
He currently serves on the advisory board of the Discrimination and National
Security Initiative of the Harvard University Pluralism Project and the national
council of advisors for South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow and has been
a contributing writer for Dorf on Law and AsiaMedia. He also has been a member
of the International Law Committee and International Human Rights Committee
of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
Before attending law school, he worked for Cable News Network, the MacNeil/Lehrer
NewsHour, and the New York City Department of Transportation. He received a
J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.P.P.M. at the Yale School of Management, and
an A.B. from Brown University.
Visit http://www.kalhan.com
Sukeshi KAMRA (Associate Professor of English, Carleton
University , Canada )
Sukeshi_kamra@carleton.ca
Professor Kamra describes his article “The Force of Law and the Outlawing
of Patriotism: The Bangabasi Trial (1891)” as follows: The constitution
of the (European) subject of democratic governance is, it is generally agreed,
in and through law. The particular, and peculiar, iteration of this principle
in colonial rule ( India ) has been remarked upon often: an uneven, formal
observance of law co-exists with a generalized culture of racial hierarchy
and prejudice, also unevenly expressed and practiced. The formal procedures
in which law’s universality, impartiality, and judiciousness are embodied
co-exist, that is, uneasily with a justified inobservance of a full democratic
system which is most famously described in John S. Mill’s comment that “dependencies” not
fit for representative government are justifiably governed by the more advanced
(“Representative Government”).
What then can one say of the constitution of the racially marked, governed
indigene of colonial rule? Not allowed the luxury of being situated outside
of colonial law (post-1860), and being required to participate in a legal process
that was bewilderingly complex and removed (judging by complaints made in the
indigenous press), the constitution of the indigenous subject takes place in
and through colonial law.
While the outcome of the process is where the significance of the trial of
the Bangabasi under section 124A is concentrated, its process, or as much of
it as we can piece together from the Proceedings of the Home Department (October
1891) and the Indian Law Reports (Calcutta 1892), is as revealing of the strategies
employed in reading Indian texts (that too in translation many times over),
strategies that were also to be employed over the next couple of decades in
subsequent trials. Visit http://www.carleton.ca/english/faculty/kamra.htm
Eileen KAUFMAN (Professor of Law, Touro Law Center ) eileenk@tourolaw.edu
Eileen Kaufman, Professor of Law at Touro Law Center , received her B.A.
with highest honors from Skidmore College and her J.D. and LL.M. from New York
University Law School . Before joining the faculty at Touro, Professor Kaufman
served as managing attorney at Westchester Legal Services. She was Touro’s
Vice Dean from 1996-2000. Professor Kaufman teaches Torts, Constitutional Law,
and Sex-Based Discrimination. Among her professional activities, she is the
co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers, was the Reporter for
the New York Pattern Jury Instructions Committee, chaired the Bar Admission
and Lawyer Performance Committee of the American Association of Law Schools,
and served as a member of the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to
the Bar of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the New York
State Judicial Institute on Professionalism in the Law. Professor Kaufman has
published primarily in the areas of civil rights and women’s rights.
She is the recipient of the 2004 Ruth G. Schapiro award of the New York State
Bar Association.
Professor Kaufman is the founder and co-director of Touro Law Center 's Summer
Program in India , the only ABA-accredited summer program in India . Since
1995, she has taught a comparative constitutional law course there that focuses
on issues of race, caste and gender. Her publications include "Women and
Law: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and Indian Supreme Courts'
Equality Jurisprudence," 34 Georgia Journal of International & Comparative
Law 557, 2006, reprinted as lead article in Indian Juridical Review 2007;
and "Dazzling the World: A Study of India's Constitutional Amendment Mandating
Reservations for Women on Rural Panchayats," 19 Berkeley Women's Law
Journal 29, 2004, co-authored with Louise Harmon. She is currently working
on a project that analyzes the legal status of Tibetans residing in India .
Fareeha KHAN (PhD candidate, Department of Near Eastern
Studies, University of Michigan ) fareehak@umich.edu
Fareeha is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan . Her dissertation
is entitled Reforming Law Through the Traditional Madhhab: Ashraf ‘Ali
Thanawi’s Fatwa on Women’s Right to Divorce. Through her training
at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, she has developed
expertise in Islamic Law, the Islamic intellectual tradition, Islam and modernity
(in particular reform movements of the modern Muslim world), and women and
Islam. Her studies have been focused on two major geographical areas of the
Muslim world: South Asia and the Middle East . She has also conducted some
research into topics related to Islam in America .
For her dissertation, she is studying a well-known treatise of the celebrated
Indian Muslim jurist, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (d. 1943), who attempted through
his treatise to provide Muslim women with the right to divorce. This treatise
ultimately had far-reaching consequences, since it had a strong influence on
the important Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939 in India, and it
continues to influence the way in which divorce is dealt with in the Pakistani
legal system as well as in the broader South Asian diasporic communities, particularly
those in the UK and the United States. Unlike the modernist reformers of his
day, Thanawi utilized tools from within Islamic legal methodology to bring
about the reforms in divorce law that he desired. It is important that his
call for reform was done from within the tradition, since, in this way, he
was able to maintain continuity, and therefore a level of interpretive authority.
Riyad KOYA (PhD candidate, Department of History, UC Berkeley) skoya2@berkeley.edu
Riyad is a graduate student in the History Department at UC Berkeley, focusing
on the comparative study of marriage law for Indian migrants abroad in the
British Empire . This project requires him to think critically about the
construction of legal identities and the importance of renewed attention to
legal studies within the broader field of South Asian studies.
His project focuses upon the manner in which colonial societies sought to
govern Indian marriage in the context of the indentured labor system. His
research to date has suggested that in the early stages of indentured labor,
Indian migrants possessed limited means to prove the validity of their marriages
under civil law. Therefore, from the 1860s forward, colonial governments
began to craft specific marriage legislation for Indian migrants, issuing ordinances
providing for “Heathen” or “Indian” marriage. These
pieces of legislation validated marriage between the migrants by means of
civil registration with a district magistrate or immigration official. Significantly,
as research on Natal ordinances has shown, colonial officials often treated
this form of civil marriage as indissoluble, thereby curtailing the possibility
of divorce for Indian women, who were “witnessed” into the marriage
registration by their husbands.
The question of the form of “Indian marriage” therefore was a
particularly vexed one within the British Empire . As migrants crossed
jurisdictions within the British Empire , judicial decisions were rendered
to delimit the territorial scope of personal and customary law. One of
the key conflicts in the recognition of Indian customary marriage in a colony
such as Natal or Fiji was the question of whether British law ought to recognize
polygamous or child marriages. In the context of India itself, such marriages
were underwritten by the British recognition of the jurisdiction of “Hindu” and “Muslim” personal
law over the domestic sphere and matters of family law.
Omar KUTTY (PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, University
of Chicago ) omarkutty@hotmail.com
Genevieve LAKIER (Postdoctoral fellow, Weatherhead Center
for International and Area Studies, Harvard) glakier@hotmail.com
Genevieve’s dissertation is an examination of popular political mobilization
in Nepal over the course of the democratic period, although based on fieldwork
conducted between 2002 and 2004. It examines the role coercive mobilizations
such as the bandh (general strike) played in the negotiation of political power,
and economic/social privilege over the course of the democratic period. She
is very interested, with respect to these kinds of coercive, violent, collective
demonstrations, in the ways in which they functioned to establish rights and
privileges in lieu of, and in contrast to, the bureaucratic procedures of law.
In normative democratic theory, of course, demonstration (understood as a form
of speech) operates in addition to, and as a supplement for, the legal workings
of the state and the courts; but throughout South Asia, and perhaps, one might
imagine, the third world more broadly, it is instead through mobilization that
groups ensure the distribution of privileges and rights that either could not
or would not be guaranteed by a legal system in which few trust or have access.
Katherine LEMONS (PhD candidate, Rhetoric and Anthropology,
UC Berkeley)
klemons@berkeley.edu
Katherine’s dissertation research focuses on practices and institutions
of dispute adjudication within the Muslim community in contemporary North India,
particularly those disputes that technically fall within the domain of personal
law - those about marriage, divorce, inheritance and succession. She found
that while personal law questions are to be adjudicated in the civil courts
according to the state’s version of the relevant religious law, they
are actually often mediated and adjudicated in many extra legal institutions,
such as women’s arbitration centers, shariah panchayats and the offices
of Muftis. She therefore looked at three Sharia Panchayats, or Darul Qaza,
one Muslim Women’s Arbitration Center, or Mahila Panchayat, the fatwas
and advice offered by a popular Old Delhi Mufti, and the ‘fatwas’ and
mediation sessions of the head of the All India Muslim Women’s Personal
Law Board in Lucknow, U.P. Her research seeks to think through the various
aspects that inform the practice of Personal Law: religion, gender, conceptions
of community, language and economic context. Each site of adjudication worked
through a different type of authority and emphasized a different aim of adjudication.
All were, however, produced through the interplay between conceptions of religion,
gender and family organization, community, and economy.
Renisa MAWANI (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University
of British Columbia , Canada )
renisa@interchange.ubc.ca
Dr. Renisa Mawani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology.
She has published in the areas of moral regulation and state formation; (post)colonialism,
law, and space; histories of Chinese migration to British Columbia; legal constructions
of Aboriginal Identity; and the mutually constitutive relations between law
and nature. Her publications have appeared in journals including Law/Text/Culture, Social
and Legal Studies, ARIEL, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and Social
Identities. She is currently working on two books. The first, which is
near completion, tracks the encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese
migrants, and Europeans in late nineteenth and early twentieth century British
Columbia. This monograph examines the differing juridical truths about ‘race’ that
constituted the colonial contact zone as well as the colonial projects these
knowledges inspired. The second is a (post)colonial legal history of Vancouver ’s
Stanley Park that examines the relations between law, nature, and empire. Newer
projects include a study of the Komagata Maru, which centers on questions of
South Asian migration, mobility, and violence within the British Empire as
well as diasporic anti-colonial struggles. Visit
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For Link
Mary MCGEE (Professor of Religion, Columbia University ) mm383@columbia.edu
Visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/religion/faculty-data/mary-mcgee/faculty.html
Sarah MEHTA (JD candidate, Yale) sarah.mehta@yale.edu
Sarah received an Honors B.A. in South Asian Studies and Development Studies
at Brown University . In 2003 she received the Bishop McVikar Award for
Religious Studies and the Pembroke award in Gender Studies for her thesis on
Muslim women, citizenship, and Islamic family law, based on fieldwork in Hyderabad
. She returned to India in 2005-2006 as a Fulbright scholar at the Centre
for Policy Research where she worked on a World Bank study of public interest
litigation and researched the use of religious resources in development projects
for Muslim women. She also worked on the Sachar committee report on the socio-economic
status of Muslims, examining discrimination against Muslims in social services, and
is currently interested in proposed anti-discrimination legislation in India
.
Megan MOODIE (Mellon-Sawyer Fellow, Franklin Center for
Interdisciplinary and International Studies, Duke University ) meganmoodie@yahoo.com
Megan’s dissertation in anthropology, “ Culture or Freedom? The
Gendered Intimacies of Modernization in Rajasthan,” explores how discourses
about Rajasthani women’s oppression-by-culture becomes involved in the
ongoing project of fashioning an emancipated post-colonial India . The idea
that “ India will only be free when its women are free” is particularly
salient in this region, where freedom is understood as law, rights, and market
participation, and unfreedom is culture understood as feudalism, religious
orthodoxy, and patriarchy. Her ethnographic work centers on how women in Rajasthan
relate to one another under the sign of the projects that are undertaken in
the name of their freedom, including reproductive health, micro-credit, and
dowry reform.
She is currently turning her dissertation into a book, tentatively entitled An
Ethnography of Freedom: Building Dhanka Basti in Jaipur. It looks at
how one particular Scheduled Tribe, the Dhanka, are recasting their ideas
about freedom as reservations for their employment decline. Building on the
ethnographic work she conducted in an urban Dhanka neighborhood on reproductive
health and dowry reform, she is taking a broader look at the implications
of privatization for those who have benefited from reserved seats in education
and government, which the Dhanka undoubtedly have in the last twenty years.
She is particularly interested in how intimate gender relations are being
renegotiated in relationship to shifting understandings of constitutional
guarantees and what they may or may not provide in the future.
Smita NARULA (Faculty Director, Center for Human Rights & Global
Justice, New York University ) narulas@juris.law.nyu.edu
Professor Smita Narula is a Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights
and Global Justice (www.chrgj.org) at NYU School of Law, and Assistant Professor
of Clinical Law of the International Human Rights Clinic. Her research, litigation,
and advocacy projects focus on key human rights issues including: discrimination
on the basis of caste, race, religion, and gender; human rights violations
in the “war on terror”; the promotion of economic and social rights;
and the accountability of corporations and international financial institutions
for human rights abuses. In addition to focusing on human rights issues in
South Asia , she has also researched post-September 11, 2001, abuses against
South Asian immigrants in the United States . Before joining NYU in August
2003, Narula spent six years at Human Rights Watch, first as the organization’s
India researcher and later as Senior Researcher for South Asia . In this capacity,
she oversaw Human Rights Watch’s work on India , Pakistan , Sri Lanka
, Bangladesh , and Nepal , and helped coordinate the organization’s response
to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan .
Professor Narula has conducted numerous human rights investigations in South
Asia on topics such as: bonded child labor; abuses related to the HIV/AIDS
epidemic; caste discrimination; state-sponsored massacres; the marginalization
of religious minorities; gender-based violence; and violations of the right
to education. She has also regularly briefed U.N. agencies, international human
rights treaty bodies, government officials as well as the media. She has authored
a variety of reports and articles on caste discrimination worldwide and on
the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia, including a report titled Broken
People: Caste Violence Against India’s ‘Untouchables’ for
which she received the 1999 Human Rights Award from India’s Dalit Liberation
Education Trust.
She graduated from Harvard Law School , where she was Editor-in-chief of
the Harvard Human Rights Journal. She received a Masters in International
Development from Brown University and worked on HIV and public health at UNICEF
and the United Nations Development Fund.
Anshuman PANDEY (PhD candidate, Department of History, University
of Michigan )
Anshuman is interested in the political aspects of language and ethnic identity
viz. the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, the use of legislation to
raise demands for ethnic recognition, etc. He is also interested in the manner
in which Hindu religious texts are cited in the opinions written by justices
of the Supreme Court of India.
John PINCINCE (Visiting Assistant Professor of History,
Loyola University Chicago )
john.pincince@gmail.com
Professor Pincince recently completed his dissertation, “On the Verge
of Hindutva: V.D. Savarkar, 1905-1924,” in the Department of History
at the University of Hawaii . The dissertation examines a seminal period in
the life of Savarkar and the evolution of the Indian nationalist movement during
the first two decades of the twentieth century. A large proportion of the dissertation
is devoted to an examination of the British Government of India’s criminalization
of Indian political practice, particularly elements that advocated political
violence as a means of anti-colonial resistance, deemed by the colonial regime
as “extremist” and “anarchist.” Specifically, he researched
and wrote about several Special Tribunal trials held at the Bombay High Court
in 1909 and 1910.
Asifa QURAISHI (Assistant Professor of Law, University of
Wisconsin-Madison)
aquraishi@wisc.edu
Professor Quraishi specializes in Islamic law and legal theory. Visit
http://law.wisc.edu/faculty/biog.php?iID=639
Vikram RAGHAVAN (World Bank attorney, Washington) vikram1974@gmail.com
Sunil RAO ( University of Wisconsin law librarian of foreign
law) strao@wisc.edu
Sunil Rao is Foreign Law Librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
He is the author of “ India : A Legal Research Guide”: http://library.law.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/wp2html?indialaw.wpd
http://law.wisc.edu/faculty/biog.php?iID=529
Jeff REDDING ( Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow
in Law, Yale Law School )
jeffredding@gmail.com
Jeff Redding is an Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow in Law at Yale Law School . He
has worked for Lawyers Collective in Delhi and Mumbai, and also as an
Assistant Professor of Political Science/Law at the American University in
Cairo , Egypt . His research interests and experience, in both India
and Pakistan, relate to Islamic law and legal institutions, the interaction
of state and non-state legal actors, personal law, and also law and sexuality. Mr.
Redding earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago School of Law.
Tamara RELIS (British Academy Research Fellow, London School
of Economics and research fellow, Columbia Law School ) t.relis@lse.ac.uk
Drawing upon preliminary insights deriving from new empirical fieldwork research
in urban and rural locations in Delhi, Maharashtra, A.P. and Karnataka, Tamara’s
research examines legal, lay and gendered actors’ understandings, aims
and experiences in the processing of human rights violation cases of serious
violence against women. Actors’ perceptions (victims, accused, family
members, lawyers, judges/mediators) act as a lens to map, theorize and critically
analyze the processing of these cases in formal lower courts, court-linked
and extra-legal informal justice mediations (lok adalats, mahila panchayats,
nari adalats).
In particular, Dr. Relis examines how, if at all, international human rights
norms (e.g. CEDAW 1979) have permeated the processing of these cases in formal
versus informal justice mechanisms, a s well as the reception by local actors
of international human rights norms relating to gender violence. In exploring
the limits of human rights discourse, as well as the interplay between legal
and extra-legal actors involved in these cases, t he findings speak to the
debate on universalism versus cultural relativism as well as the theoretical
ideas informing these processes, e.g. restorative justice and norm diffusion
theory. The paper additionally provides a critical look at the boundaries created
between both formal and informal justice in India as well as between ratified
international law and realities on the ground in the processing of gender violence
cases. Visit
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/staff/tamara-relis.htm
Mitra SHARAFI (Assistant Professor of Law and History, University
of Wisconsin-Madison ) mitrasharafi@yahoo.com
Professor Sharafi’s research examines the Parsi legal history of colonial
South Asia . Currently, she is working on a book manuscript that examines Parsi
litigation circa 1900 across a variety of colonial South Asian courts, including
the Parsi Chief Matrimonial Court of Bombay, the Bombay High Court, the Chief
Court of Lower Burma, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Forthcoming
publications include review articles on Assaf Likhovski’s recent book, Law
and Identity in Mandate Palestine, and on legal pluralism and the cultural
defense. She teaches contract law at the UW Law School, and offers legal history
courses through the undergraduate “Legal Studies” program at UW-Madison.
Visit
http://law.wisc.edu/faculty/biog.php?iID=812
Mark SIDEL (Professor of Law, University of Iowa ) mark-sidel@uiowa.edu
Professor Sidel’s work on law in India and South
Asia focuses on the legal regime affecting the voluntary sector, including philanthropy,
the nonprofit sector, and civil society. For several years he has served as academic
director of a five-nation project on Philanthropy and Law in South Asia, funded
by the Asia, Ford, Himalaya and Rockefeller foundations, that focuses on Bangladesh,
India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. This project produced a volume, Philanthropy
and Law in South Asia (Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, 2004). With
funding from an American foundation, the Philanthropy and Law in South Asia group
from Bangladesh , India , Nepal , Pakistan , and Sri Lanka and Professor Sidel
will meet in Delhi August 11-12 to update developments in the region and to issue
an update report. His scholarly work on Indian and South Asian law also includes
the articles that have appeared in such law journals as the Tulane Law Review, Chicago-Kent
Law Review, International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, and Harvard
Asia Quarterly as well as in edited volumes. Visit
http://www.law.uiowa.edu/faculty/mark-sidel.php
Aseema SINHA (Associate Professor of Political Science,
University of Wisconsin-Madison)
asinha@polisci.wisc.edu
Professor Sinha specializes in comparative politics at UW-Madison. Her research
focuses on the political economy of India , comparative federalism, India-China
comparisons, and international sources of change in developing countries. Visit http://polisci.wisc.edu/users/sinha
Ryan SOLOMON (PhD candidate, Rhetoric, UW-Madison) rsolomon2@wisc.edu
Ryan’s work focuses on the relationship between rhetoric and law in
light of the epistemological considerations that underlie legal jurisprudence,
and the impact that has on the way we think about rationality in law, as well
as the way we think about justice. His research looks at the way jurisprudence
functions in indigenous legal systems in different parts of the world, mainly
in Africa and Asia .
Avani SOOD (PhD candidate, Social Psychology, Princeton
) avanimsood@yahoo.com
Mytheli SREENIVAS (Assistant Professor of History and Women’s
Studies, Ohio State University ) Sreenivas.2@osu.edu
Professor Sreenivas’s approach to South Asian Legal Studies is through
her disciplinary background in modern South Asian history and her research
interests in the cultural history of families in colonial south India . Drawing
upon legal disputes concerning political authority and property ownership during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she examines the law for what it may
reveal about shifts in families—as both institution and ideology—under
the conditions of colonial rule. In the process, her research also investigates
legal discourses and institutions themselves. She is particularly interested
in the gendering of legal frameworks governing families and their property. In
her own scholarship, therefore, the law functions both as an archival “source” of
historical data and as a site of interrogation about the cultural history of
colonial rule. Some of her research in legal studies will appear in her
book, Wives, Widows and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Tamil India (forthcoming,
Indiana University Press). An article on colonial property law, “Conjugality
and Capital: Gender, Families and Property under Colonial Law in India ,” has
appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies (2004). Visit http://womens-studies.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=2100
Rachel STURMAN (Assistant Professor of History and Asian
Studies, Bowdoin College )
rsturman@bowdoin.edu
Professor Sturman’s research interests center on colonialism, law and
modern liberal state formation. She is currently completing a book, Law’s
Subjects: Property, Family and Value in the Making of Modern India ,
which explores these issues through a study of historical formulations of property
and personhood in colonial civil law, focusing on the Bombay presidency. In
her next project, Professor Sturman looks at the British imperial system of
indentured labor, which transported more than a million Indians to British,
French, and Dutch colonies around the world in the aftermath of the abolition
of slavery. She will use the prism of law to examine how ideas about humanity,
citizenship, rights, and violations were defined within the national, transnational
and imperial frameworks of the indenture system. Visit http://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/r/rsturman/
R. SUDARSHAN (UNDP Policy Advisor on Legal Reform and Justice,
Bangkok )
sudarshan@undp.org
R. Sudarshan is a UNDP policy advisor based in Bangkok with expertise in
the legal affairs of India and recently, Nepal .
Ashwini TAMBE (Assistant Professor of Women’s and
Gender Studies, University of Toronto , Canada ) a.tambe@utoronto.ca
Ashwini Tambe is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies and History
at the University of Toronto . Her research focuses on colonial South Asia
, gender and sexuality studies, and global political economy. Her upcoming
book, Codes of Misconduct: The Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Bombay (
U. of Minnesota Press , 2008), traces the relationship between forms of prostitution,
law making, and law enforcement practices in colonial Bombay . Her current
research focuses on the changing legal age standards defining girlhood in twentieth-century
India .
Ananya VAJPEYI (Assistant Professor of History, University
of Massachusetts ) ananya.vajpeyi@umb.edu
Professor Vajpeyi is interested in law as it relates to a variety of subjects,
among them caste (social inequality), violence (particularly political conflict
and communal violence), and rights (via citizenship and displacement).
Sylvia VATUK (Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University
of Illinois at Chicago ) vatuk@uic.edu
Professor Vatuk is a social anthropologist who has fairly recently developed
a particular interest in the sub-discipline of legal anthropology. She
is especially concerned with questions about the relationship between individuals
and the law in modern nation states, conceptualizing law as a resource that
people use in negotiating the changing circumstances of their daily lives. Over
the course of many years she has undertaken field research for extended periods
in India and has written many scholarly articles on a variety of topics
related to issues of family and kinship, aging, and gender relations in South
Asia, among both Hindus and Muslims. Much of her work has a strong historical
component as well, and she has become increasingly interested in recent years
in South Asian legal history, particularly with reference to Muslim personal
law.
The research project in which she is most actively engaged deals with questions
of Muslim personal law and its impact on women in the contemporary period.
She has carried out ethnographic investigations, interviewed participants and
examined case files in family and criminal courts, focusing on women clients
involved in litigation related to disputes over marriage, divorce, maintenance,
marital property, child custody, domestic violence, and related problems and
also gathered material on and conducting interviews with religiously observant
women leaders of a nascent "women's legal rights" movement that is
becoming increasingly active, prominent and influential within the Muslim communities
of many of the large and medium-sized cities all over India. Visit http://www.uic.edu/depts/anth/faculty/vatuk.html
Paul WALLACE (Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University
of Missouri-Columbia)
wallacep@missouri.edu
Professor Wallace has written extensively on Sikh and Punjab politics, and
has been serving as an expert witness and consultant for immigration-related
cases for two decades. He was also a special witness for the Air India trials
in Vancouver, both the one concluded a year ago, and the ongoing investigation.
Visit http://web.missouri.edu/~wallacep/
Anita WEISS (Professor of International Studies, University
of Oregon ) aweiss@uoregon.edu
Professor Weiss specializes in Pakistan , South Asia and comparative Muslim
cultures. Her recent books include Power and Civil Society in Pakistan (2001)
and Walls within Walls: Life Histories of Working Women in the Old City
of Lahore (2002, 2 nd ed). Visit
http://www.uoregon.edu/~caps/faculty/weiss.html
Thank you…….
The organizers would like to thank the sponsors and Professor Marc Galanter
for their generous support as well as all the participants for their contribution
towards making the pre-conference workshop a success.
