Historian Mahmood Kooria of the University of Edinburgh has urged scholars to rethink some of the most widely accepted assumptions that shape modern relationships with premodern global legal history.
During Professor Scaria Zachariah Memorial Lecture at Mahatma Gandhi University here on Monday, Dr. Kooria drew on examples from the Indian Ocean world and beyond to outline certain key perspectives that are essential to understanding pre-modern law, especially when viewed against modern or modernist notions of legality.
According to him, ritual formed a central component of law in premodern societies, particularly in religious legal traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, where law governed daily life from worship to crime. He also sought to challenge the idea of a state monopoly on law, noting that in many pre-modern contexts legal authority was dispersed among lawyers, families and communities. Law was often created and administered by jurists rather than rulers, making legal pluralism a useful, if limited, framework for understanding premodern legal orders.
At the same time, he rejected the tendency to equate modernity with the rule of law, arguing that pre-modern societies had strong ideas about justice and the legal order. He also urged historians to treat legal texts as valuable sources of social history rather than dismiss them as purely doctrinal because they offer insight into everyday conflicts and social relations. Dr. Kooria also emphasized the importance of studying paratexts such as marginal notes, interlinear translations, and manuscript features, drawing on social codicology and new philology, to better understand how law was transmitted, interpreted, and lived.
The session included a memorial address by Aju K Narayanan and was chaired by Dineshan V.
Published – 15 Dec 2025 20:57 IST
