SLR Editorial Board
“Decolonisation” has seen a palpable revival in India – through historical revisionism, as a media narrative, and in its latest avatar, for legal reform. Our series focuses on the last, in light of the newly-adopted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS). The legislations have been explicitly signalled as a step towards decolonisation.
Yet, even today, colonialism creeps on us through the force of law – be it the complicity of international law in Israel’s settler colonialism in Palestine or the continuing historical injustices against indigenous peoples. What then, does it mean for a legislation or a legal system to be “colonial” or “decolonial”? This apparent paradox between shedding colonialism to regain lost power dynamics, while simultaneously asserting the same language to assert power in the present, calls for deeper deliberation and scholarship in the field. SLR is proud to present three essays examining some of these questions.
In the first essay, Decolonisation as Critical Praxis, Rishika Sahgal argues that decolonisation cannot be contained within legislations but is more meaningfully enacted through steadfast rejection of every structure of oppression and domination. Practicing decolonisation allows us to view the ways in which supposedly decolonial laws continue to perpetuate oppression. She therefore suggests that the language of decolonisation in the context of the new laws is “at best empty and rhetorical; and worse still, a means to mask the continuation of coloniality in our criminal laws.”
In the second essay, On Decolonising Law in a Time of Genocide, Maria Giannacopoulos presents us a view on de/colonial law that is educated by the violent nature of constitutional law in Australia. Laws here are not seen as working in silos, requiring “decolonising” of individual legislations but rather as an infrastructure that we must analyse to unveil relations of domination. Importantly, the essay provokes us to ask: what is the place of constitutional law, given its liberatory potential in India, even as it is locked in a violent infrastructure?
Our final essay is by Arudra Burra, ‘Decolonising’ the Law: The Wrong Answer to the Wrong Question. This essay performs a crucial exercise in clarifying that the current discourse on decolonisation obfuscates the distinction between the historical and the normative. By illuminating this distinction, it describes how colonial-era laws have been both continued and transformed in independent India. This forces us to rethink our relationship with colonial-era laws and the recent reforms that ostensibly seek to “decolonise” them.
Together, these three essays invite the readers to challenge their pre-existing notions of decolonisation of law. As students and scholars of socio-legal studies, we are prompted to think of the possibilities, promises, and limits of law in the decolonisation project, and to dream of decolonised futures, beyond law.
Feature Image: Saul Leiter
This post is part of a series on "Decolonisation and the Law." Read the other posts here.
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