THE LEGALIZATION OF CASTE-BASED DIVISION IN SOUTH ASIA BY THE COLONIAL REGIME.

As I have described above, the collective wisdom of Roman society was used to divide people and
subjugate one another. In contrast, the South Asian civilization evolved a notion of organic solidarity as a
foundation of society, thus avoiding a system in which some people may subordinate others. Individuals'
profession was protected from unhealthy competition, and duties were imposed on each not to meddle
in others. The concept of personality, in contrast, divides society based on status-class. Like Roman
society, British society adopted a system of a class-based division of people. It divided people between
Lords (aristocrats) and commoners. British

society followed the track of slavery, more cruelly. The Varna Byabastha, over time, changed into a
stigmatic caste system and eventually unleashed an insidious practice of untouchability. The British East
India Company legalized the Varna Byabastha, which had already been widely cotten and converted into
the caste system. To divide Indian secrets to its lowest bottom fine, the colonizers also legalized the
praction of untouchability. The custom of untouchability was the product of this degeneration. In 1871
(initially in 1841), the Colonial Government passed a las, the "Criminal Tribe Act, which introduced a
system of inhuman or eruel apartheid against the Dalit community of India. By this Act, the larger
population of the Sudra community was condermed as a criminal tribe and deprived of their dignity as
human beings,

Before the British regime, the tribal communities in India enjoyed protection and recognized identity.
They practiced unique cultures of their own, which differed from the Vedic Dharma. These communities
stood out of the sphere of the Varna Byabastha. Before colonization, they had been respected by the
native population as distinct cultural groups with distinct traditional skills, professions, and cultures. But
the British amalgamated the Sudra caste group and the tribal communities into one social group and
placed them at the bottom line of the social hierarchy.

Further, a notoriously derogatory and contemptuous law-the Criminal Tribe Act-had been oppressively
enforced against them, creating widespread impacts on their lives. Under this law, they would not be
able to live in the inner parts of the city; neither could they migrate from one village to another. The
category of their dwelling was strictly prescribed. They had been legally compelled to carry out all kinds
of dirty jobs. Access to education and government employment had been strictly barred for them.

After this legalized apartheid was introduced, most tribal people's socio- economic conditions degraded
rapidly. During colonial rule, their general situation got reduced to a highly derogatory social status and
depraved life conditions. Social exclusion, isolation, and hatred became common parlance. The practice
of untouchability turned into an intolerably heinous derogated practice. Before the British, the practice
of untouchability against the Sudra community was limited to social isolation but not to social hatred.
The Criminal Tribe Act induced a legally protected social and communal hatred. It was virtually
transformed into slavery that was practiced in Europe. One of the motifs of the colonial government
behind the adoption of this Act was to cause displacement of the tribal people from the lands because
most tribal people lived in the forest and mineral-rich areas; the colonial settlers and merchants wanted
to grab these forests and grounds for their exclusive benefits by logging and mineral extraction. The
enforcement of this Act compelled the tribal people to give up their lands and resources. The Criminal
Tribes Act was enforced in North India and later extended to Bengal Presidency and Madras presidency.

This legislation was a typically draconian piece of law, which, disrespectful to all forms of human values,
manifested a gruesome racial hatred. Under this Act, specific tribal communities had been mischievously
branded as Habitual Criminals or Bom Criminals, Only a few communities were included initially, but it
was 150 communities with consistently expanded I and sometimes embraced population of 60 million.
The British regime shamelessly displaced them, forcing them to scatter and suffer bitterly from their
cultural identity.

DIVISION OF SOCIETY, THE INVENTION OF DESTRUCTIVE NARRATIVES, AND THEIR IMPACTS ON THE
SYSTEM OF LAW

In the past, as many people have presented. India has had a religiously diverse but tolerant society.
Though the Hindu faith holders had an immense majority, India comprised a significant presence of
Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, and many smaller animistic faith holders. They lived without religious conflict;
religious tolerance and harmony prevailed among them. This diversity was, however, deformed and
transformed into communal cleavage by colonial rule, gradually but perniciously. After the total seizure
of India, the British colonizers began dividing the population systematically and religiously, thus planting
seeds of perennial conflicts and hatred among each other. A fractured society always proved helpful or a
boon for deepening control and exploiting resources. Through this plummeted division, the population,
religiously, socially, and culturally, the colonizers had been fully able to control most parts of South Asia.
They adopted an insidious strategy of enforcing personal laws to perpetuate religion and caste-based
division.

Earlier, the so-called Hinduism (historically known as Vedic Sanatan Dharma) did not exist in India as an
organized religion. No one was called a Hindu religious group in South Asia. The sole and stealthy credit
for inventing this pernicious narrative goes to the British colonizers and European Orientalists.
Moreover, the credit for forming an organized Hindu religious group also goes to the British colonizers.
15 Bean Heath, a Eropean researcher, has angued that British Colonialism had three key strbung factors
to the invention of Hinduism. He says: "The Orientalists das Wilham Jones and Edward Mour contributed
through their academie systematizations and generalizations of Indian religion. "He adds, "Colonial
social structures contributed by a generalization of Hinduism through bureaucratic means, and
indigenous religious traditions contributed through their construction of Hinduism as a competitor to
Christianity. Most madiously, in subsequent ages, the organized structure of Hinduism provided a basis
for Indian nationalism against colonial rule. Today, Hinduism has become a rich ground for
communalized and criminalized politics in India. This unwanted trend thus developed has swayed even
the politics of Nepal in our time. There have been several groups with vested political and economic
interests in Nepal forcefully pushing demand for the Hinduisation of Nepal and restoring monarchy as a
guardian and center of Nepalese nationalism. The influence of this Religionised communal politics has
been one of the excuses for the rapidly growing mission of Christianisation of a certain segment of the
Nepalese population. Allegedly, the Hindu communalized politics has been funded by certain Western
religious organizations to unleash division among Nepalese people, thereby accelerating the pace of
Christianization. The colonial rulers of India either had also effectively practiced this strategy to foster
Christianity. By unleashing hate and faith confrontation between the Hindu and Muslim populations, the
colonial rulers provided a favorable condition for the rise of Christianity in India.

The British colonizers amply exploited the classical Hindu texts to justify the division of the population
into four distinct Varnas as a traditional system of regulating Indian society. By the time the British
colonizers arrived, the Varna system had already been distorted into a caste system and consolidated
into a hierarchical structure of Indian culture. The colonizers seized this opportunity or momentum to
implement their Divide and Rule strategy effectively. Hence, they introduced many policies and laws to
institutionalise this unwanted fracture of the society legally, this fracture was seen as a boon for the
consolidation of their rule perpetually. A note from Macdonell, a colonialist scholar, is plain evidence for
understanding the fact of how seriously they had been engaged in strategizing the mission of fracturing
the Indian society to its nadir. In his words, "Turning to the old law books, of which the code of Manu
(about A. D. 200) is the most representative for our purposes, we are confronted with a society that is
already strictly organisd based on castes." The British colonialist scholars, once convinced about the
caste system's benefit, promptly translated the Manusmriti and other orthodox texts into the English
version. Some European Orientalists had been encouraged to engage in this mission. And several such
texts, including the Four Veda, had been translated sparing no time.

The mission of translation had a definite scheme besides boosting European knowledge of the histories,
mythologies, religions, languages, and philosophies of South Asian societies. The project had been
inspired explicitly by the purpose of establishing certain narratives that would contribute to justifying
and legitimizing the mission of colonization and cultural influence. Therefore, this mission was part of
the bigger colonial mission of reshaping the world in the line of European cultures, religious morals, and
political thoughts. In Macaulay's words, the mission aimed to implant western intellect in the minds of
people with dark faces.

This mission involved biases and stereotypes of the European Orientalists and, therefore, systematically
destroyed the original (conceptual as well as contextual) meaning of many terms, such as Dharma. The
translation of the Sanskrit terms Dharma, Acchar, and Gyana (Jana) into English terms "religion,"
"morality," and "knowledge," respectively, appeared with orchestrated echoes, therefore. As a part of
the same mission, the British Colonialists and Orientalists introduced the English term Civilization in
South Asia, with echoing significance, as an instrument of grouping various cultures into distinct
categories and scaling their levels or standards of sagacity, profundity and modernity. Under this
mission, the South Asian civilizations were dubbed by a narrative of Ancient Civilizations. This narrative
was coined to scale down the level or standard of South Asian cultures. The narrative placed the South
Asian civilizations under inferior standards compared to European civilizations, complacently
appreciated and praised as modern civilizations. And they treated all inventions of South Asian cultures
and knowledge systems as religious, irrational, and illogical products. The narrative concluded that the
South Asian law and justice system fell into a sacred, mysterious, exotic, and irrational category. Deeply
influenced by such prejudices and stereotypes, many British and European scholars and travelers
mocked the legal and judicial systems practiced in India and Nepal. One can see the accounts of Brian H.
Hodgson on Nepal's justice system.

From the awareness of the above perspective, my pursuit of the first year in Patna stood tumultuous. It
was my first introduction to the History of Colonization and its Impact. The information discussed above
produced a wave of agitation, annoyance, pessimism, and courage to go deeper to discover the hidden
reality. My so-called pride in Nepal's history as A Free or Independent Nation from the British Colonial
Yoke came to be significantly shattered here in Patna. In the past, a naïve and uninformed
understanding of Nepal's political history has kept me happier and proud to be a citizen of Nepal. My
colleagues also often raised this fact which ignited a pang of happiness within me. After I encountered
the realist history of colonials of in India, my previous perspective began to fall. I learned that though my
territory was not occupied colonially, my systems of education, law, justice, and political and
bureaucratic mindsets had been gripped by the colonial influence, if not fully colonized.

But I continued that enspuged learning of law, politics, and the impacts of colonialism uninterrupted.
This reality taught and made me aware that I was, like my Indian colleagues, submerged in colonial
water up to my neck My legal system, education, clothing, thinking pattern, politics, and political
behaviors all had been colonial offspring. The Common Law system was not my Common System but
had been imposed to make my Common System. This was a developed system of law and functioned
well. But this has not grown in my social and cultural contexts; hence, its relevance could not conform to
my socio-cultural significance. Therefore, it was a Common Law System for the English people but not a
Common Law System for the Nepali and Indian people. Being informed about the reality produced
mixed impressions or feelings within me-I felt satisfied with what I was doing but also profoundly sad
about what our societies were doing in the name of justice.

Nevertheless, the study of colonial hegemony inspired me to deepen my search for the history of my
indigenous system of law, which was described by some British jurists, in the words of Austin, as a
system of law improperly so-called. Henry Maine and many others expressed the system practiced in my
history as a system of religious law; hence, it was the law only by analogy but not by substance. Even
today, when I read articles published by some lawyers, judges, and law teachers in Nepal, I find their
pseudo- understanding echoing Nepali legal history as a history of religious history. In their minds,
colonial narratives' influence is thicker than rhinoceros' skin-it is not easy to break. The colonial history
of the legal system in South Asia damns all indigenous systems of law and justice as Religious and thus
incompetent to match with the Western legal systems. It discerns that any legal system that can be
called Law properly so-called (or law qua law) should be originated within the European social and
cultural settings. Western legal scholarship often portrays the legitimacy of a legal system as a product
of Western political machinery. Hence, the Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedural Code could be
defined as laws as the law properly so- called, versus Dharmasastra as improperly so-called law. Not
surprisingly, the knowledge I culled here in that regard caused a sense of shock in my still immature
cognitive process; it unleashed a dull pessimism in my mind but simultaneously proved to be a source of
inspiration to dig out more information. This inspiration led me to focus on and specialize in studying
jurisprudence and legal philosophy.

Prof. A.D. Roy Choudhary, a law professor as well as a homeopathie doctor, was a professor of Hindu
jurisprudence. He was typically Bengali in language and culture. He possessed a deep sense of pride in
his Bengali culture and language. Despite our Guru-Chela (Teacher-Students relationship, we became
friendly. The main reason was my love and little ability to communicate in Bengali. I practiced speaking
Bengali with some Bengali-speaking friends in primary school. Since Jhapa bordered Bengal,
communication between Nepalese and Bengali-speaking people was not unusual, mainly because
Naxalbari and Siliguri provided at that time usual market access to people from Jhapa. With that ability,
Prof. Choudhary found me among a rare number of colleagues to speak in his mother language. His
knowledge of Hindu jurisprudence was Doctrinaire and Sophistic, broadly-often, my friends teasingly
commented as a hair-splitting method. He had a thorough understanding of Dharmasutra texts but was
a bit pedantic. Hence, it was not always easy to follow his discourse.

As a Bengali, he was a fan of P.N. Sen's book on Hindu Jurisprudence. Furthermore, of his Bengal origin,
he belonged to the Dayabhaga School of Vedic Legal Tradition, which maintained, in some areas of the
legal tradition, the substantial difference between the Mitakshara School. But Prof. Choudhary was an
apologist, to some extent. So he somehow defended British colonizers' efforts to introduce a Common
Llaw system in India, which, in his view, brought modernity to the Indian legal and justice system. Prof.
Choudhary, too, believed that the Vedic Tradition of Law or Dharmastura texts provided not a modern
but a sacred system of law. As such, he held some differences with the ideas of P.N. Sen. I had no
reasonable grounds to disagree with his apologist assertions for my minimal information of the Vedic
Tradition. But his lectures allowed me to broaden the scope of areas to indulge in more study.

Over time, I explored many articles contributed by prominent jurists and nationalists from India that
helped me trace out accurate information about the history of Vedic law traditions. Historically, India,
divided into many kingdoms, stood as a society for centuries. So we are encouraged to ask a question: if
the Common Law system was the only effective secular law. then what law governed the Indian
population before it was transplanted here? This question remained a matter of debate between Prof.
Choudhary and me for two years. He resorted to long peripheral arguments to convince me, but without
success. Nevertheless, his views drove my attention to the Vedic law tradition's roots. Though even P.N.
Sen's book could not answer all my queries, several lectures offered by K.N. Singh, a professor of Legal
history covering a substantial portion of British law in India, amazingly helped me to clear my way to
further understanding of the consolidation of the colonial rule in India and the harm caused by to the
indigenous laws and jurisprudence.
Once they achieved complete political control, the British colonizers and Orientalists systematically
indulged in a socio-religious population division. They gradually widened the plummeting socio-religious
fracture of the society. Simultaneously, they began importing laws and judicial institutions from England.
The process of the legal and judicial transplant was backed by the narratives that the Indian legal and
judicial systems had religious undertones and thus could not be befitting to all communities and
addressing modern commercial and criminal law matters. James Mill, a British contemporary utilitarian
philosopher, was appointed senior company official in 1819. Before he began working for the company,
he finished a book on the history of India (History of British India) by which he demonstrated a strong
contempt for the indigenous Indian institutions of governance.119 He explicitly judged the standards of
Indian legal and judicial systems and civilization. His judgment was, however, superficial and subjective.
This book made strenuous efforts to dispel some positive descriptions of Indian cultures written by some
Western writers, like Voltaire. Rejecting Voltaire's assertion, he argued that India was a hideous state of
society. What he intended to mean by this assertion was to demean the Indian culture and its ability to
self-rule.