Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination

Focusing on criminality, caste, inheritance and adoption, this text illustrates how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, broader Victorian ideological norms, appealing to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, colonial and legal history, and particularly Indian colonial culture.

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Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena.