ABSTRACT
Colonial history and the split-subject of law During the establishment of British rule in northern India, Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India (1772-85), entrusted with the establishment of a new legal system, believed that native subjects should become active participants in the process of their own governance. This liberal construction of law ascribing a certain residual agency to the administered persisted in subsequent legal discourse. It derived in part from the general predicament of natural law of the late Enlightenment, but also from specific tenets of common law in Georgian England. It was aptly enshrined in the dictum of William Blackstone, the foremost English authority of the time that the lawfulness of punishing criminals is founded upon the principle that the law by which they suffer was made by their consent. Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9), such consent was a part of an original contract by which individuals were tied to society. The early colonial lawmakers in India did not find such a notion out of place, although their political relationship to native Indian subjects rendered such an implicit contract often untenable in practice.1
