ABSTRACT
Modern Indian legal reforms, premised on Western juridical frameworks, presume that codified law and formal institutions are the rightful vehicles for delivering justice. Yet this assumption rests on a cultural self-understanding foreign to Indian traditions. This paper does not ask whether these systems are “efficient” or “just”; it asks whether they are intelligible in the Indian context. Drawing from the philosophical traditions of Dharma and Nyāya, this paper contrasts the Western notion of justice—as universal, codified, and state-enforced—with Indian traditions like the Panchayat, where justice emerges through community consensus and ethical context, revealing an epistemic rupture of colonial legal systems transplant abstract norms, divorcing ‘justice’ from lived experiences. What remains is a legal order intelligible to law, but alien to those it claims to serve. What we call “delay” or “inefficiency” in the legal system may, in fact, be symptoms of a deeper incompatibility. Traditional systems, far from being rudimentary, reflect a cultivated ability to go-about with disputes—not to adjudicate them from above. Legal reform, then, must begin not with better codes, but with a rethinking of the human being and justice itself. Only then can law become something one learns to live by, not merely obey.
