SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In legal discourses about Hinduism and the related laws as ‘the West’s other’, this comes out prominently today in fierce ideologically grounded battles over the continued recognition of personal law systems. Given that Hinduism is a family of culturally similar traditions marked by unity-in-diversity, it has been impossible to neatly define ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Hindu law’. Since 2014, India is again ruled by a so-called Hindu nationalist government, which seems to have its own ideas about what ‘Hindu law’ is or may be, but also claims to recognise its constitutional obligations as a government for all Indians, not just for Hindus. Yet despite reliance on effectively culture-specific basic claims as an interconnected cosmic system, these Hindu law perspectives necessarily involve recognition of various forms of the ‘legal other’, both Hindu and ‘non-Hindu’, built into the system since ancient times and continued, despite repeated predictions of disaster by detractors.