'The altar of custom' : personal law reform in late colonial India

India’s personal law system, where family law matters are rooted in religious law, has been the subject of a diverse array of historical, legal, and political scholarship. In this work, I analyze the evolving legal treatment and rhetorical use of the word “custom” in family law debates around marriage and inheritance from the nineteenth century to 1937. I use the discursive role of custom lens to analyze family law, highlighting evolutions in the family law’s structuring of sex relations and religion, which I link to broader trends in colonial governmentality. To ensure a discussion of both Hindu and Muslim personal law, I conduct discourse analysis of colonial jurists, as well as agitation around the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act and the 1937 Hindu Women’s Right to Property and Shariat Acts. By assessing these sources, I show how custom helped to structure Hindu and Muslim personal law as parallel legal regimes, how custom discursively played into the alliance between women’s rights organizations and nationalist organizations, and how custom became rhetorically deployed with increasingly communal overtones by the 1930’s. Through using custom as a cross-communal lens to analyze family law reform, I demonstrate how the personal law system gendered legal identity through property and conjugality, situating my work in a broader body of literature on colonialism’s relationship with law, property, and women’s rights.Middle Eastern Studie