“Going to Law”: Reflections on Law, Religion, and Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia

The book opens with a brief vignette highlighting an approach to the city, property, giving, and the expansive way in which the trust moves through the city, religious life, and the book itself. What would it mean to understand the trust as offering a horoscope to the city? The Introduction then moves on to lay out the basic structure of trusts as legal instruments and their inheritances from three distinct socio-legal histories: Zoroastrian forms of religious charity, English law, and Islamic concepts of giving and keeping. It will briefly introduce the reader to the Parsi community in India and their specific status as a minority in the city.

Inheritances

2023

In Perpetuity

2023

Chapter 1 takes up the provocation from the author's interlocutor within the Charity Commission that the trust directory might offer a horoscope of the city. It will explore the historicity of trusts and how they capture and utilize time in urban space. This chapter follows the trust as it traverses the timescape and municipal regulatory constraints of Bombay-Mumbai. It will show the early transformation of Parsi property into real estate during the colonial period and then discuss some critical figures who founded the trust landscape in the city. It will end with a discussion of how the doctrine of cy près allows the trust to work within the meantime, the temporality of the subjunctive, rather than allow its objects to fail.

Presents and Futures

2023

Chapter 2 explores issues of temporality through charitable giving with the story of Jerbai Wadia, the widow of a hugely wealthy family. She endowed several plots to the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) as communal housing for Parsi beneficiaries. While greatly benefiting her coreligionists and encouraging Parsi migration from rural areas to the city, Jerbai's communal beneficence came from partially disinheriting two of her sons, who had converted to Christianity. Her descendants are now in a battle over the management of her charitable gifts with the BPP. The chapter will examine how the trust troubles the giver–receiver binary of reciprocity in terms of the obligations owed and the temporality of those obligations. The trust structure (the tripartite settlor, trustee, beneficiary) reorganizes religious giving into an intergenerational relation of obligation and accountability and challenges assumptions of the centrality of reciprocity to social life.