Description: This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.
Brief description: Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian of South Asia. She is Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with History affiliation. She hosts the South Asian Legal History Resources website.
Review Quotes: 'Mitra Sharafi's monograph on the legal culture of the Parsi's, a community of ethnic Zoroastrians, is an invaluable contribution to the fields of legal history and Parsi studies. It is arguably the most important work to date in the latter of the field. ... For the legal historian as well as for the historian of South Asia, the value and novelty of Sharafi's work will lie in the colonial legal system. For the scholar of Parsi studies, the strength of the work lies in tackling a well-established area of community life in new, thorough, and transformative ways.' Simin Patel, Law and History Review