Anglo-Hindu Law - Administration and Practice - British Administration of Hindu Personal Laws

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."