Colonial law in India and the Victorian imagination

Author / Creator

Neti, Leila, author

Available as

Online

Summary

"Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination reads works of fiction from the nineteenth century alongside three legal cases heard before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which w...

"Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination reads works of fiction from the nineteenth century alongside three legal cases heard before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which was the highest court of appeal for colonies within the British Empire. By pairing legal judgments with novels by prominent Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Philip Meadows Taylor, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, I show how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, the broader ideals of imperial expansionism during the nineteenth century. Rather than thinking of the legal and literary realms as distinct, however, I read the judicial opinions as instances of narrative that share many of the same tropes and strategies typical to the nineteenth-century novel. The legal cases in the study are summarized in Moore's Indian Appeals, a 14-volume catalog of appeals from Indian courts to the Privy Council from 1836 to 1872. The written summaries of the cases, consumed as texts, were the main avenue through which an English audience could become acquainted with legal disputes in India. And, as is clear from my readings of the judicial opinions, the Privy Council used modes of narrativity (to organize temporality, character, plot etc.) that were also commonplace in Victorian literature. Reading the legal texts as literature allows us to explore the division between reality and fiction, and to look at the ways in which legal opinions created norms that intersected, often unpredictably, with other forms of cultural representation. As this book demonstrates, reading the archives of the JCPC and the Victorian novel together opens up a series of questions. Does fiction shape materiality in ways that are similar to how materiality shapes fiction? Does reading a text as fiction create different strategies and avenues of interpretation? Is what we think of as reality possible outside of the turns of imagination that we recognize in fiction? These are some of the questions that motivate this study and which Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination seeks to answer"--

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