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Ronojoy Sen, Identifying and Regulating Religion in India: Law, History, and the Place of Worship. By Geetanjali Srikantan, Journal of Church and State, Volume 64, Issue 4, Autumn 2022, Pages 740–741, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csac072
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Geetanjali Srikantan’s book is an ambitious and timely work on the legal regulation of religion in India at a time when disputes over religious practice and places of worship regularly appear before the courts. Srikantan, however, steps back from the contemporary to examine Indian law’s colonial heritage. She argues that the “impasse around the regulation of religion does not lie in the insufficiency of legal reasoning or the failure of the Indian secular state but has its roots in the methodologies and frameworks used by the British colonial administrators in identifying and governing religion” (p. 7).
Srikantan looks in detail at the production of Hindu and what was known as Anglo-Muhammedan law in colonial India. The 1780 Administration of Justice Regulation, passed by Warren Hastings, is well known. It provided that with regard to personal laws Hindus should be governed by the Shastra and the Muslims by the Quran. On Hindu law, Srikantan examines the writings of British officials, such as Luke Scrafton, Harry Verelst, and Henry Maine, colonial judges like William Jones and J.H. Nelson, landmark rulings, such as Collector of Madura v Motoo Ramalinga, and lesser-known ones to conclude: “[T]he choices that the British had in preserving customary law or enacting codes were limited by their own perspective on what constituted law and who could interpret it. In the Indian context, the law was to be found in the religious texts of the Hindus, which were in the custody of the Brahmin priests who were their interpreters” (p. 60).
