British Administration of Hindu Personal Laws
Personal laws can be defined as a, "Part of law that deals with matters pertaining to a person and his or her family". In the case of India, personal laws also refer to the religious laws separately administered to both Muslims and Hindus. The British were quite noble in their painstaking attempts to administer the true religious law of the people they were colonizing. Theodore Goldstucker summed this up well stating, "The Indian system of jurisprudence, the system of law administered in India by the English, is of the strangest description, unparalleled in the history of the world. No government was ever called upon to legislate for so heterogeneous a community, or to combine together so many conflicting systems of law under on general administration of justice. That community includes Hindus, Mahomedans, Englishmen, Buddhists, Jews, Armenians, and Parsees."
Read more about this topic: Anglo-Hindu Law, Administration and Practice
Famous quotes containing the words british, personal and/or laws:
“There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous—secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will—we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“So far as laws and institutions avail, men should have equality of opportunity for happiness; that is, of education, wealth, power. These make happiness secure. An equal diffusion of happiness so far as laws and institutions avail.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)