From dharma to law and back? Postmodern Hindu law in a global world (original) (raw)

It is an observable fact now that Indian law has developed over the past few decades, away from the outwardly postcolonial and partly aggressively modernist presuppositions of the 1940s and 1950s, towards an embarrassed self-critical assessment of the present and an almost anxious vision of the future. This is what I portray here as a postmodern approach. The earlier, almost blind belief in modernisation and its inherent promises of progress has been replaced by a typically Hindu form of trust in the possibility of a better future, for which all concerned parties have to work. One might call this the dharma of postmodern Hindu law. Building on Masaji Chiba's jurisprudential models my paper's analysis of recent developments in Indian family law and constitutional law illustrates how and why Indian law makers have lost faith in the alleged superiority of western models and have begun to remember some of their own fragments of legal history and conceptual elements which are now...