Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative proudly unveils the shortlist for the 2023 edition of The Karwaan Book Awards recognizing outstanding contributions to historical research. The esteemed shortlisted authors are Sudeshna Guha for ‘A History of India through 75 Objects’ (Hachette India), Elizabeth Lhost for ‘Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia’ (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), and Akshaya Mukul for ‘Writer Rebel Soldier Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya’ (Penguin Random House India). The winner of the 2023 Karwaan Book Award is "Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia" by Elizabeth Lhost, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

 

The Karwaan Book Award is more than a celebration of intellectual excellence; it is a testament to the power of historical inquiry and the indomitable spirit of preserving our shared history. These shortlisted works exemplify the dedication of authors and their commitment to unravelling the intricacies of our past.
 

Jury Citation for Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia by Elizabeth Lhost

 

It is a landmark study of the legal process in colonial India, but it has wider historiographical implications that promise to deepen and reshape our understanding of the state-society interactions in British India, and the social communication that was so crucial to the making of modern South Asia. Focusing on the routine legal encounters, the work draws our attention to the significance of non-state actors in shaping the legal arena in the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, Lhost makes a strong argument in favor of legal pluralism, and through an exploration of the everyday lives of Muslim litigants, presents the legal process as constituted and reproduced by the interaction of the evolving legal arena with the colonial judicial system. The author has explored an unusually rich archive that is removed from, but in conversation, with the state in modern South Asia. Looking at the dispersed rulings of the Muslim clerics on matters of inheritance, marriage, divorce and maintenance, and the religious rulings/opinions or fatwas issued by Muslim scholars and divines, Lhost visualizes law as a process, not a ‘structure’, one that can be better apprehended by shifting the focus away from the state to the messy localities, away from the British courts to the routine, everyday legal encounters of ordinary litigants in the towns and qasbas in 19th-20th centuries. Drawing out a rich archive of vernacular law, she also shows how Islamic law in practice was  marked by pluarlity, a definitive legal answer at one moment, did not foreclose competing and contradictory answers in the future, and explains how it continues to exist in multiple and multi-vocal forms.