SOAS Research Online

A Free Database of the Latest Research by SOAS Academics and PhD Students

[skip to content]

Sharma, Kanika (2018) 'Mother India: The Role of the Maternal Figure in Establishing Legal Subjectivity.' Law and Critique, 29 (1). pp. 1-29.

[img]
Preview
Text - Accepted Version
Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

Psychoanalytic jurisprudence attempts to understand the images used by law to attract and capture the subject. In keeping with the larger psychoanalytic tradition, such theories tend to overemphasise the paternal principle. The image of law is said to be the image of the paterfamilias—the biological father, the sovereign, or God. In contrast to such theories, I would like to introduce the image of the mother and analyse its impact on the subject’s relation to law. For this purpose, I examine the history and use of the figure of Bharat Mata or Mother India and how it influences the Indian subject’s relation to law. When the subject is torn between his loyalties to the lawmaker–as–father and the nation–as–mother, who does he side with? Eschewing Greek myths and the Oedipus complex, I focus instead on Hindu mythology and the notion of an oedipal alliance to understand legal subjectivity in India. Lastly, I analyse a defining Indian political trial, the Gandhi murder trial, in which all these notions come to play and the accused justifies his decision to murder the father of the nation in the name of the motherland.

Item Type: Journal Article
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > School of Law
ISSN: 09578536
Copyright Statement: © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017. This is the accepted version of an article published by Springer in Law and Critique: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9197-4
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9197-4
Date Deposited: 13 Mar 2018 12:40
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/24249

Altmetric Data

Statistics

Download activity - last 12 monthsShow export options
Downloads since deposit
6 month trend
1,671Downloads
6 month trend
368Hits
Accesses by country - last 12 monthsShow export options
Accesses by referrer - last 12 monthsShow export options

Repository staff only

Edit Item Edit Item