ABSTRACT
Today, many would agree that Western legal institutions and ideas were shaped by Christianity and its conceptions of the human being and society. Yet, thinking about the relation between law and culture has neglected to examine the implications of this fact. What happens when legal institutions, which depend non-trivially upon the presence of certain religious ideas, are introduced into a completely different cultural setting? This chapter takes up the case of India and the legal institutions introduced by British colonialism; it looks at notions of truth and falsity, the role of the witness and judge, the nature of juridical facts and the idea of the general interest. Indeed, India inherited Western legal institutions and ideas, but from whom and in what shape did it inherit them? The chapter focusses briefly on the British who introduced these Western institutions into India but did so in a corrupted form. When Indians adopted the coloniser’s way of dealing with law, they in turn did so as cultural beings: their own cultural practices and ideas concerning justice, truth and persons shaped their ways of going about with the legal institutions and ideas inherited from the British.
