Organizer: Rachel Sturman, Bowdoin College

Chair and Discussant: Sudipta Sen, London School of Economics, UK

Recently, the significance of theories and institutional forms of property in structuring modern personhood has become a matter of urgent concern across multiple disciplines. Combining approaches from history, political theory, legal studies, and literature, this interdisciplinary panel explores the emergence, theoretical foundations, and operation of a modern property regime in South Asia since the colonial era. Thus, in analyzing the foundational role of the modern contract in underwriting the system of indentured labor migration (following the abolition of slavery), Mongia suggests that the colonies might well be the paradigmatic site for the formation of the "possessive individual" of liberalism. Sturman, in her examination of the adjudication of family property within late-nineteenth century colonial courts, demonstrates how questions of will, autonomy, and subjectivity produced new and differential forms of legal subjecthood. And Merrill links eighteenth century European debates on "piracy," "creativity," and authorship to recent impasses between a dominant WTO/TRIPPS regime and the claims advanced by activists such as Vandana Shiva. Taken together, the papers provide a genealogy of a modern property regime in South Asia. But more importantly, they aim to provoke conversation and analysis by offering a re-evaluation of issues of translation, transplantation, and movement (of peoples, ideas, texts, and institutional structures); by reflecting on the implications of the reification of culture (in both ethnographic and aesthetic senses) as a form of property; and by interrogating, more broadly, how colonial and postcolonial sites figure in understandings of modern "global" property regimes, critical to (neo)liberal personhood.

Radhika V. Mongia, University of California, Santa Cruz

The British abolition of slavery in 1834, and the establishment of a system of Indian indentured labor migration in its wake, mobilized powerful new notions of the contract. Legal scholars have noted (without recognizing the signal role of abolition) how, from an earlier emphasis on the notion of "equality in exchange," or "fairness," contract law was transformed in the nineteenth century to a near-exclusive focus on the notion of the "consent" or "will" of the contracting subject. This shift readily corresponds to the ironies of abolition, in which "freedom" for ex-slaves was accompanied by the controversial establishment of a state-regulated system of Indian indentured labor migration that aimed to effectively replace the labor of freed slaves, while producing a new version of the contract. In this context, the debates that emerged on indenture ultimately turned on the nature of this labor contract, and the freedom of the contracting (indentured) subject. This paper reads these debates to argue that the events of abolition and its aftermath might well provide the best explanation for the global transformations of nineteenth-century contract law. It thus suggests that the paradigmatic site for the separation of "consent" and "will" from the notion of "equality in exchange" that characterizes the nineteenth-century reformulation of contract law, and, indeed, of the paradigmatic "possessive individual" of liberalism, is to be found not within the metropolitan heartland, but within the peripheral sites of Mauritius, the Caribbean, and India that the paper examines.

Rachel Sturman, Bowdoin College

This paper draws on the records of the late-nineteenth-century Bombay High Court in cases concerning widows, minors, and others, to explore a central conundrum in the colonial treatment of indigenous property: while colonialism may have expanded the operation of the commodity form and the notion of universal equivalents, the colonial courts nonetheless adjudicated ownership and legal subjecthood according to differential property forms and categories of person. That is, in India, as in Britain, ownership of jewelry was treated differently from ownership of a house, and more crucially, the claims to and nature of ownership also varied by person: a husband held property differently from a widow; so likewise members of elite and non-elite castes, disabled, diseased and able-bodied persons, legitimate and illegitimate sons. In this sense, in the classical liberal contradiction, the links between forms of property ownership and forms of personhood worked at once to posit universals and to reinforce differential subjecthood. Yet, more pointedly, while particularly in the context of those deemed incomplete legal subjects (e.g. widows, minors, non-elite caste members), questions of autonomy and self-mastery dominated legal reasoning, at the same time, the court often used this denial of self-mastery as the grounds for establishing compensatory rights. Thus, the paper argues, a problem of "compensation" and the failure of universal equivalents structured the articulation of rights and legal subjecthood, with crucial implications for the colonial and post-colonial state.

Christi A. Merrill, University of Michigan

In much the same way that booksellers in 18th century England argued that without the right to guard against "piracy", authors would no longer feel compelled to create works of original genius, proponents of the 1994 WTO/GATT Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property have essentially argued that individuals require adequate protection for their work and ideas to ensure they have sufficient incentive to invent and create the commodities on which modern civilization depends. Detractors of the TRIPS Agreement charge that such laws only protect the interests of powerful monopolies and replicate colonial-era injustices. Such laws, Indian activist Vandana Shiva argues, serve to close off the biological and intellectual commons to those who have traditionally relied on and cared for them. Shiva and others have thus challenged the global community to protect indigenous knowledge systems and resources by relying on a model of sovereignty that refutes the assumptions of self-interested liberal subjecthood and emphasizes an alternative organization of "public" and "private" interests. This paper will examine how the concerns over maintenance of the biological commons might extend to examples of literary re-creation. If, as Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha urges, the responsibility of a writer is to nurture the "seed" of a story, how might we consider the implications of this metaphor – of multiple originals and copies, germination, growth – in the light of current TRIPS debates? How might we productively explore the paradox of copyright residing in the living person of an author when a text has been multiply created?