Project codification : legal legacies of the British Raj on the Indian mercantile credit institution hundi

Abstract

This discussion contributes to the history of the colonial rule of law that governed market practice in India using the South Asian indigenous credit institution known as hundi. A centuries-old artery of credit for Indian merchant networks, and a living institution that has largely been driven underground by twenty-first-century laws, hundi provides a window into the dynamics of colonial law from the commercial and financial legislation of the 1880s to the final attempt to codify hundi in the 1960s and 1970s in a bid to bridge the growing disconnect between the Indian indigenous banking sector and modern banking. I chart the British colonial and postindependence history of hundi as means of understanding the wider political, legislative and economic dynamics of colonial state formation and the legacies of legislation.