Shruti Rao
Independent Researcher
Andhra Pradesh, India
Abstract
This study investigates how subaltern individuals—peasants, artisans, women, and lower castes—made their voices heard in 19th-century British colonial court records in India. While colonial courts chiefly served imperial interests, their archives inadvertently preserved detailed accounts of marginalized actors asserting grievances, negotiating rights, and engaging with legal norms. Employing a mixed-methods framework, we first systematically sampled 200 case files from the Bombay and Calcutta High Courts (1830–1900), identifying 70 cases involving subaltern participants. Through close textual analysis, we coded instances of legal argumentation, moral appeals, and invocation of customary norms. Concurrently, we surveyed 100 contemporary experts—legal historians, anthropologists, and archivists—using a structured questionnaire to gauge modern assessments of subaltern agency in these records. Our archival findings reveal that subaltern litigants not only understood key legal concepts (property, contract, inheritance) but also adeptly framed their grievances in hybrid linguistic registers, blending vernacular idioms with colonial legal terminology. Petitions and testimonies frequently referenced local customs to bolster claims, demonstrating strategic adaptation to the colonial judicial framework. Women’s appearances, though less numerically frequent, exposed critical issues of gendered power in domestic disputes and inheritance conflicts. Survey responses underscore persistent methodological challenges—language translation, archival bias, and contextual gaps—yet affirm the feasibility of “reading against the grain” to recover subaltern subjectivities.
Keywords
Subaltern, Colonial Court Records, Legal History, Agency, Archival Analysis
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