Shishir Bail

SHISHIR BAIL, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received a grant in April 2021 to aid research on “Gods in Court: the legal lives of deities in India,” supervised by Dr. Rosalind Morris. In contemporary India, gods appear in court. This statement is not figurative, but instead invokes the peculiar device on the basis of which Hindu social practice is made intelligible under Indian law: Hindu deities are legal persons under postcolonial Indian law. They are thus frequently parties in ordinary litigation, and can sue and be sued. How do divine personages transcend the sacred realm and participate in the profanities of litigation? What does it mean for a god to fight a case in court? This study firstly traces the juridical record to illuminate the origins of the legal personality of Hindu deities in the context of 19th century debates on corporate personality in law. Then, it examines the transformation in the legal reckoning of deities under the Indian Constitution, and later, the coincidence of law and Hindu nationalist politics in the debate surrounding the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. Alongside this, through ethnographic fieldwork in the north Indian towns of Ayodhya, Varanasi, and Lucknow, the study explores the texture of quotidian disputes involving deities and their property, subjective reckonings of the relative salience of gods, the state, and the nation, and therefore, the imbrication of Hindu social practice within these diverse agencies.