Realising Justice? Normative Orders and the Realities of Justice in India

Antje Linkenbach and Aditya Malik
Realising Justice? Normative Orders and the Realities of Justice in India
Manohar, 2024
ISBN: 9789360802660
352 pages
INR 1995.00

How is justice conceptualized? Does it appear as a distinct, guiding normative principle in Indian intellectual traditions? How does it relate to other concepts like equality, and responsibility? What are the ground realities of justice in India? Are there competing normative orders? Are there forms of compliance, or are there discrepancies between normative rules of justice and the everyday practices of social actors? Are ideal rules ignored, modified, adapted in everyday practices according to the particular contextual realities? Could we identify particular arenas of (in)justice, like class, caste, gender, or natural resources? Is justice something that is continuously being ‘realized’ in shifting historical and social contexts?

These questions compel us to reconsider interlinked fields essential to theorizations of modernity – the autonomous individual, kinds of agency and knowledge, equality, aspiration, and choice. This book provides a penetrating, novel approach to an understanding of the ideas, concepts, meanings, and practices surrounding justice and its related concepts in the past and in contemporary India. The authors base their analysis either on meticulous and extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted among different communities in rural and urban milieus by focusing on oral narratives, ritual and religious contexts, local historical accounts, and the experience of marginalized communities or on a deep, rigorous textual analysis of modern and pre-modern written sources such as early Sanskritic texts dealing with law, recent legal documents, inscrip­tions, and land deeds among others.

Antje Linkenbach, a sociologist and social anthropologist, is Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Max-Weber-Kolleg) at the University of Erfurt. She has widely published in the fields of social theory, development critique, environmental justice, and social movements. Aditya Malik is Founding Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Plaksha University and former Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg. His research and publications focus on oral traditions and ritual performance; religion, social justice and law; historiography; as well as the intersections of humanities, social sciences and technology.