5 - Litigation and the politics of sectarian control, 1878–1925

Summary

The continuous interaction between the temple and the Anglo-Indian judicial system between 1878 and 1925 has features of both local and comparative interest. In the first place, it reveals the process by which native litigants appropriate an alien legal language (both literally and metaphorically) to their own purposes. More important, it reveals the transformation of previously social categories into actual social organizations, of previously ritually constructed privileges into bureaucratically defined ones, and of a relatively fluid system of alliances into a relatively rigid and antagonistic set of interest groups. These three processes, which are here discussed in a highly specific cultural and historical milieu, might constitute the key processual features of a more generally applicable model of how modern colonial regimes (especially those based on Anglo-Saxon legal traditions) affect indigenous political and cultural systems.

For organizational and stylistic reasons, this chapter is divided into two parts. The first section places the argument of this chapter in the context of the preceding chapters, as well as in the general theoretical context of the impact of English law and legal institutions on Indian society in general and South Indian temples in particular. This provides a general theoretical and historical backdrop for the specific ethnohistorical analysis of data from the Śrī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple during this period. The second section, therefore, locates the general issues raised in the first in a specific micro context.