Question of Community: Religious Groups and Colonial Law

Taking two famous and popular legal trials in Bombay, the Aga Khan Case and the Maharaj Libel Case, the author shows that the Indian court worked with a 'notion of group membership as religious community where experts, Westernized Indians or British scholars, elicited the "truth".' She further asserts that the colonial judiciary's denial of the polities' ability to govern themselves and their simultaneous governance by the colonial state meant that individuals were identified in law or in the courts with a marked religious community. Such a legal system defines society as 'religious' and traps social groups into wider fundamentalist identifications.