Page 1 Date: Thursday, 16 April 2015
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm CSH library, 2 Aurangzeb Road, New Delhi – 110011 The Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH)is delighted to invite you to a lecture by Dr. Kriti Kapila and Dr. Anuj Bhuwania on From Rights to Adjudication and Beyond: Legal Anthropology Perspectives on Contemporary India chaired by Prof. dr. Leïla Choukroune The Public Aspirations of the Law in India Dr. Kriti Kapila Why do ordinary people litigate in India, knowing fully well the routine delays and injustices that are written into the process? In my presentation I suggest that the place of law in ordinary lives is not merely instrumental, i.e. as a problem solver. The relationship between law and society in contemporary India is created equally by the gap between the two as it is by the way law uniquely positions itself above routine failure. Using my ethnographic research among the Gaddis in Himachal Pradesh and the recent upsurge of khap justice, I explore some themes of the ordinary work of law in India today. Dr. Kriti Kapila is Lecturer in Anthropolgy and Law at the India Institute, King’s College London. Her main research interests lie in understanding the public life of the culture‐concept ‐ in popular politics, law and public policy. She has written extensively on the politics of indigenous recognition with respect to tribes in India. Kriti completed her PhD in Social Anthropology -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 at the London School of Economics. Before joining King’s, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Wolfson College. Public Interest Litigation as a slum demolition machine Dr. Anuj Bhuwania In this paper, I will examine how the procedural departures made possible by India’s unique Public Interest Litigation (PIL) jurisdiction enabled it to function as a slum demolition machine. I argue that most of the city‐related PIL cases of the first decade of the 21 st century often did not end up in any ‘judgments’ at all but in an endless spiral of ‘orders,’ which are not reported in law journals. This enabled the Court to perform a role that can scarcely be called adjudication, as it is usually conceived. However, much of the scholarship on PIL has ignored such specificities of this jurisdiction and has continued to concentrate on the completed judicial process, i.e. judgments and other reported decisions of the courts, and the discursive charge they have. I argue, on the other hand, that to understand this phenomenon of the court‐led remaking of the city in its materiality, the procedural departures of PIL, which the Delhi High Court took to its reduction ad absurdum in this period, have to be understood and foregrounded. Dr. Anuj Bhuwania is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. He studied law in National Law School of India University, Bangalore and School of Oriental and African Studies, London before doing his PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), both in New Delhi. -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
