Lecture by Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthy, winner of the Collège de France Prize for Young Researchers 2023
Like the Ottoman Empire and the Central Asian Khanates, the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) - the last great imperial power to dominate the Indian subcontinent before British colonialism - was governed by institutions, norms and practices derived from Hanafi law, one of the four legal schools of Sunni Islam. How did the norms elaborated by the learned law of Hanafi jurists shape Mughal institutions ? Drawing on multilingual archives in Arabic, Persian and Indian vernaculars, we offer a brief overview of Mughal administrative and legal practices to show the asymmetrical power relations that existed between agents of imperial authority and subjects in societies composed of different castes, ethnicities and religions. The aim is to apprehend the legal normativity between the standards derived from the casuistic method of jurists and their uses by chancelleries, administrators and judges at work in the Mughal Empire, one of the most centralized imperial power regimes of the modern era. We interrogate the day-to-day practices of rule enforcement to capture the professional know-how of the Hanafi legal system that developed in the region. In this way, we bring the legal culture of Mughal India into dialogue with the history of empires in Islamic lands.
