Partition and the politics of the joint family in nineteenth-century north India

Using nineteenth-century case law, legal and social theory, and ethnography, this essay will examine colonial attempts to coalesce complex relational identities into individual and collective ones, and to create ‘the Hindu joint family’ as a codified ritual and property-holding collective. Focussing on texts and court cases that considered the ‘joint family’ as a social unit under siege or a property collective at the point of dissolution, we can see how individuals were forced to privilege certain social and intimate bonds above others in establishing a clear identity before the state. The importance of the creation of alienable property rights and markets in land became a clear motive for supporting the North Indian Hindu joint family as a social norm across India. Courts felt free to assign identities and to codify customs when confronted with syncretic practices or blurred ‘traditions’ that had characterised eighteenth-century families.