• Vita

    Aparna Balachandran is Associate Professor of Modern History in the Department of History, University of Delhi, where she has been teaching in the postgraduate programme since 2010. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University, her MPhil from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University ( Delhi) and her BA and MA in History from the University of Delhi. Her teaching and research interests are in the legal, urban, and sonic histories of colonial South Asia. She has been the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including at the University of New South Wales, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (formerly the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History), and Heidelberg University.

  • Research Project

    Between Legal Pluralism and Colonial Authority: Urban Governance, State Power, and the Early Colonial City in South India

    This project examines the legal terrain of early colonial Madras under the rule of the English East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It explores legal pluralism in an urban context where English law and colonial courts coexisted with indigenous tribunals and customary forms of adjudication. The project asks how this plural legal order changed with the consolidation of Company power and the growing centralization of legal authority.

    Rather than viewing legal standardization simply as the imposition of state power, the project examines the relationship between different legal forums and the practices of those who navigated them. It focuses on procedural and evidential changes within customary forums, as well as on how non-elite urban residents—including artisans, petty traders, and labouring groups—selected between jurisdictions and negotiated legal boundaries. This approach highlights how social position, particularly caste, shaped access to different legal forums and the formation of legal subjectivities and urban citizenship.

    Drawing on the East India Company’s judicial, police, and administrative records, the project combines micro-historical analysis of everyday legal practices with attention to wider imperial networks. It contributes to debates on legal unity and pluralism by showing how legal standardization emerged through normative translation, strategic forum selection, and the contingencies of colonial urban governance.

  • Selected Publications

    “Legal Consciousness in Colonial India: Some Historiographical Considerations.” Inclusive, vol. 2, no. 27, July–August 2025.

    “Colonialism, Caste Formation and Urban Rule in Early Colonial Madras.” Social Scientist, vol. 53, May–June 2025.

    “Protestant State, Catholic Subjects: Religion, Law and Caste in Early Colonial South India.” In Lyndsay Campbell and Shaunnagh Dorsett (eds.), Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities. Routledge, 2024.

    “Petitions, the City and the Early Colonial State in South India.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, 2019. Special issue on “Petitions and Political Cultures.”

    “Petition Town: Law, Custom and Urban Space in Colonial South India.” In Aparna Balachandran et al. (eds.), Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India. Oxford University Press, 2018.

    “The Many Pasts of Mamul: Custom, Law and Religious Identity in Nineteenth-Century South India.” In Anne Murphy (ed.), Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in Early Modern South Asia. Routledge, 2011.