History of Law in India
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This paper will be concerned with the history of law in India, and will emphasize the ways in which that history has affected India's current political and legal structure. The earliest laws in India were grounded in Hinduism, a religious belief which was introduced to the area prior to 2,000 B.C. However, it was not until the first two centuries A.D. that the elements of Hindu law came to be codified in a written text known as Manu Samhita (Moorhouse 256). The next major historical influence on Indian law began in the sixteenth century A.D., with the establishment of the Delhi Government, also known as the Mogul Empire. This government introduced various concepts of Islamic law to the nation. In the late seventeenth century, the East India Company was founded, and thus began the rise of British law in India. The British Empire continued to hold dominance in India until the latter obtained its independence in 1947. As a result of the British presence during that time, British parliamentary law has had the strongest influence on the constitutional form of government which exists in India today. In the late 1700s, the first British Governor-General in India, Warren Hastings, sought to update the existing laws of India by incorporating British ideas into them. His plan was to retain the Hindu and Muslim laws which had already been formulated, but to impose a British court system in order to interpret those laws. Hastings intended to merge British authority and traditio
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h and early twentieth centuries. Following the First World War, Mohandas K. Gandhi led the nation of India in a nonviolent revolution against British rule. On August 15, 1947, India finally won its independence from Great Britain. As noted by Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, the nationalist movement in India had been founded along two lines: "she looked to the West, and at the same time she looked at herself and her own past" (Nehru 245). Thus, it was only natural that India's new constitution of January 26, 1950, should be an amalgamation of these two basic influences.
The strongest influences on India's constitution came from the political and legal structures of British parliamentary law (Haskins 25). In this regard, the Indian constitution of 1950 was largely based on the Government of India Act, which had been established by British authorities in 1935 (Moorhouse 256). It is interesting to note that examples from other democratic constitutions were also used in the formation of India's constitution. Most notably, the Indian constitution includes a bill of rights, "so that fundamental liberties should not be left in the unwritten custody of public opinion as in the United Kingdom, but be spelt out, as
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1476
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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