Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Tanweer Fazal
(Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU)
Will be presenting a paper on
The Mosque as a Juristic Person: Law, Politics and Public Order
Date & Time: October 12, 2017 (Thursday), 3.00 pm
Venue: CSSS Committee Room (Room No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: The dispute between Muslims and Sikhs over the Shahidganj mosque in Lahore in the early 1930s served as the prelude to the Punjabi Muslims’ decisive shift in favour of the Pakistan movement. The dispute, played out in the courts, became the site on which some of the knottiest questions of colonial jurisprudence were debated. Could the mosque, like a Hindu deity, be designated a juristic person? What laws would apply in an inter-religious dispute of this nature? And whether in such matters, the state law enjoyed pre-eminence over religious laws. Despite the unanimity over the building’s antecedents as a mosque, the courts – all the way from the Sikh tribunal, to the High Court to the Privy Council – ruled in favour of the Sikhs. The essay seeks to understand how these competing claims were adjudicated and what were the imperatives of the colonial government that resulted in such a judicial outcome. It then proceeds to examine the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri masjid case in order to understand the continuities as well as departures in the exigencies of the post-colonial state and the resolutions it offered thereof in such disputes.
Bio: Tanweer Fazal teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU. He specializes in sociology of nationalism(s), community formation and identifications with specific focus on their implications on discourse of rights and entitlements. He is the author of “nation-state and Minority Rights in India (Routledge, 2015) and Minority Nationalisms in South Asia (ed., Routledge, 2012).