Family values: Refashioning property and family in colonial Bombay presidency, 1818--1937

Property disputes formed a crucial arena in which people's intimate lives intersected with the institutions of the colonial state. This dissertation examines the types of family property disputes that came before the colonial state, as well as the shifts in colonial adjudication thereof. Property was central both to British conceptualizations of the individual, personhood, and the state, and to the ways in which Indians in this region created and marked relationships. Using records from the Bombay colonial archive and the Bombay High Court, the dissertation traces the ways in which colonial adjudication transformed the meanings of property and redefined the contours of family and the claims that kinship entailed.;Colonial officials, and the legal and administrative institutions they represented, viewed property as owned individually and absolutely. In addition, they viewed the capacity for property ownership as correlated with one's socio-legal status before the state: autonomous individuals with full legal rights held property autonomously and absolutely. In the colonial context, these formulations came up against the ways in which Indians understood property: as jointly held by all the male members of a family, as symbolically meaningful, and as encumbered with numerous claims.;Colonial efforts to adjudicate family property proceeded through the elaboration of Hindu and Muslim law. Colonial interpretations of Hindu law privileged textual dictate over customary practice in ways that enforced an increasingly homogenized, Brahminical version of Hinduism. In addition, colonial officials regularly intervened "in the interests of public policy" to curb non-elite practices relating to marriage and sexuality that were found contrary to Victorian and to Brahminical morality.;At the same time, property disputes also formed a key arena through which colonial officials and institutions defined the model of the joint Hindu family. While drawing largely from Brahminical textual norms, colonial adjudication nonetheless worked to redefine relationships within the family in terms of enforceable, but differential, rights. This pattern of adjudication expanded the autonomy of adult sons, while defining women, and especially widows, as the essence of non-autonomy in new ways. Colonial adjudication thus tended to recast a variety of hierarchical relationships within the modern frame of inequality.