Week 1
Class 1: Introduction: History, Law and Colonialism

• Marc Galanter, “The Displacement of Traditional Law in Modern India,” Law and Society in Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, 15-36. Link found here

Class 2: Precolonial Legal Regimes and the Transition to the Early Company state

• Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, Preface and Chapter 1Link found here
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• Sumit Guha, “Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country: Antiquity, Custom and Power in Eighteenth-Century India”, in Michael Anderson and Sumit Guha (eds), Changing Conceptions of Law and Justice in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 14-29 Link found here
• David Washbrook, "Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India", Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 649-721. Link found here

Week 2
Class 3 Indigenous Law and the British: “Constructing India”

• Bernard Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 57-75. Link found here
• M.R Anderson, “Islamic law and the Colonial Encounter in British India”, Peter Robb & David Arnold (eds), Ideologies and Institutions, place? publisher?165-185
• David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge”, in Carol A. Breckenridge & Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 250-278 Link found here

Class 4: 1857 and beyond: Knowledge, Authority and Pacification

• Partha Chatterjee, “The Colonial State,” The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 14-34 Link found here

• David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality”, Social Text, No. 43, 1995: 191-220. Link found here
• Radhika Singha, “Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in British India”, Studies in History, 16 (2000): 151-198 Link found here
• Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 66-159 Link found here

Week 3 
Class 5: Custom and the Codification of Difference:

• Neeladri Bhattacharya, 'Remaking Custom: The Discourse and Practice of Colonial Codification', in R. Champakalakshmi and S. Gopal (eds), Tradition, Dissent and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 20-51 Link found here
• Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959, pp. 1-47 Link found here
• Nicholas Dirks, “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39, no 1 (1997): 187-212. Link found here

Class 6: Law and Gender in Colonial India:

• Tanika Sarkar, “Conjugality and Hindu nationalism: Resisting Colonial Reason and the Death of a Child-Wife” in Hindu Wives, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism in India, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2001, 191-225 Link found here
• Lata Mani “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India” in K Sangari and S Vaid ed. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 88-126.Link found here

Week 4
Class 7:

• Stewart Gordon, ‘Scarf and sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-Formation. in Eighteenth Century Malwa’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review , 4, no 6 (1969), pp.403-429 Link found here
  
• Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 168-228  
• Sanjay Nigam, "Disciplining and Policing the `Criminals by Birth' Part 2: The Development of the Disciplinary System, 1871-1900", The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2 (1990), pp. 257-287 Link found here
  

Class 8:

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, New York, 1995, pp. 231-256 Link found here
  
• David Arnold, “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in Nineteenth Century India”, Subaltern Studies VIII, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 148-187 Link found here

Week 5
Class 9:

• Movie: The Return of Martin Guerre (directed by Daniel Vigne)/ Mithya (Rajat Kapoor: 2008)

Class 10:

• Selections from Partha Chatterjee, The Princely Impostor: The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 115-137 Link found here
  

Week 6 Modern Indian Law: Tradition, Rights and Community
Class 11:

• Marc Galanter. “The Modernization of Law,” in Myron Weiner, ed., Modernization, New York: Basic Books, 1966, pp. 153-165 Link found here
  
• Veena Das, “Communities as Political Actors: The Question of Cultural Rights, Gender and Politics in India. Ed.by Nivedita Menon; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 414-471 Link found here
  

Class 12:

• Case Study: Mohd. Ahmed Khan  Vs. Shah Bano Begum, 1985 SCC  (2) 556 Link found here
  
• Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 345-379 Link found here
  

Week 7:  The Constitution
Class 13:

• Saadat Hasan Manto, “The New Constitution”, from Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1997 Link found here
  
• Upendra Baxi, “Constitutionalism as a Site of State Formative Practices”, 21 Cardozo L. Rev. 1183*121 Link found here
  

Class 14:

• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 1-31 Link found here
  
• Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of law. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003, pp. 1-34 Link found here
  

Week 8: Partition and the Emergency
Class 15:

• Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s Emergency, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003, pp. 1-20 Link found here  pp.21-61 Link found here
  
• Maya Dodd, Archives of Democracy: Technologies of Witness in Literatures on Indian Democracy Since 1975, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Stanford University, 2006, pp. 9-40, 102-148 Link found here
  

Class 16:

• Jaya Nandita Kasibhatla, Constituting the Exception: Law, Literature and the State of Emergency in Postcolonial India, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Durham: Duke University, 2005, pp. 10-52 Link found here
  
• Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 18-37

Week 9:
Class 17: Civil Society, Politics and the Law

• Janaki Nair, “Social Municipalism and the New Metropolis’ in Mary E. John et al (eds.), Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006, pp. 125-146 Link found here
  
• John Harriss, “Antinomies of Empowerment: Observations on Civil Society, Politics and Urban Governance in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 42, Number 26, June 30 - July 06, 2007, pp. 716-2724  Link found here
  

Class 18: Identity and Citizenship

• Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, “Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender”, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds.), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 232-260 Link found here
  
• Anveshi Law Committee, “Is Gender Justice only a Legal Issue? Political Stakes in UCC Debate”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 32, Number 9 & 10, March 1 - 14, 1997, pp. 453-458 Link found here
  
• Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan, “Rowdy Sheeters: An essay on Subalternity and Politics”, Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 201-231 Link found here
  

Class 19: Summing up