YESTERDAY, the 4th Ashok Desai Memorial Lecture opened with a lecture by historian and author Manu S. Pillai, followed by the Chief Justice of India (‘CJI’) Surya Kant. The hall drew a full house of lawyers, academics, students and public intellectuals. The lecture was organised as a tribute to the life and legacy of Ashok H. Desai, Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court, who served as Attorney General for India from 1996 to 1998 and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2001.
Manu S. Pillai on the Raj and the Law
Pillai spoke on ‘Resisting Injustice: The Raj, the Law, and the Making of Modern India’. Drawing on his long engagement with pre-colonial and colonial history, he argued that India’s traditional legal landscape was far more complex and decentralised than the uniform colonial framework that came to replace it and that Indians, confronted with an alien legal and administrative order, did not simply submit to it. They found creative ways to appropriate its instruments, turn its languages and concepts to their own purposes, and in doing so, helped lay the groundwork for the constitutional republic that followed.
Pillai opened with the story of Kuriyedathu Thatri, a Namboodhiri woman from the erstwhile Kingdom of Cochin who, accused of conducting affairs with sixty-five men across different castes and classes, was put to trial in 1905. While Thatri was subjected to a ‘smartha-vicharam’, a traditional tribunal of elders, her case coincided with a moment when old customary forms were colliding with new judicial instruments that came up due to colonial influence. For the first time, the accused men were permitted to cross-examine her; for the first time, the press carried regular updates and a broader public was engaged. Thatri herself, Pillai noted, responded to her interrogators with the precision of a trained barrister, recalling dates, locations and identifying marks on the bodies of men who denied knowing her. A humorous twist to the story, Pillai added, holds that the trial was abruptly ended at sixty-five names because the sixty-sixth would have been the Raja of Cochin himself!
The lecture was organised as a tribute to the life and legacy of Ashok H. Desai, Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court, who served as Attorney General for India from 1996 to 1998.
From this opening, Pillai traced the broader arc of how the advent of colonial legal order disrupted existing social arrangements. He cited the example of his own community, the Nairs of Kerala, whose matrilineal inheritance customs and flexible marriage arrangements were abruptly recast as legally suspect once colonial law imposed scriptural Brahminical norms. He noted how the British framing of ancient Hindu law was partly a legitimising gesture – the white man restoring a pristine tradition that Indians had allegedly forgotten.
Pillai also showed how the people of the times found ingenious means of resistance. For example, the Maharaja of Jaipur would fudge his official accounts, recording official revenues at exactly the threshold below which he was required to share proceeds with the British. And the railways were swiftly repurposed by pilgrims, traders and freedom fighters.
Pillai's lecture ended with the story of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the regent of Travancore, who during the 1920s transformed the kingdom under her rule despite pressures from British officials, a skeptical press and a domineering husband. She increased the number of women in government jobs, made room for women in the legislature, and raised the women’s college in Thiruvananthapuram. Interestingly, she also appointed the first ever woman qualified in law from Travancore – Anna Chandy– who became India’s first woman judge of a High Court.
“In the most challenging of moments, in times of change and unpredictability, you don't necessarily need to espouse big and grand gestures… Small acts of resistance,” Pillai said, “have a life of their own…[and] the little streams they create will merge into something more magnificent.”
The Chief Justice's peek into the future of the Indian Judiciary
In his address, CJI Surya Kant imagined the questions the Indian judiciary of 2076 will be faced with. The law, he noted, is not a fixed monument but a living tapestry, with “each doctrine, each precedent, each constitutional value a thread woven carefully toward the uncertainties of tomorrow.”
Speaking on the transformation of the judiciary over the coming decades, the Chief Justice called attention to the role of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) and digital technologies, noting that while apprehension about these tools is understandable, the legal system stands at a generational shift. AI, he suggested, could enable processing vast volumes of material and identifying precedent, freeing judges to concentrate on interpretation and the human consequences of their decisions.
“Perhaps the most significant transformation, however, will be in the accessibility of justice, the idea that courts are distant institutions, both physically and psychologically, will gradually disappear to a new model that brings adjudication closer to citizens,” he said.
“Perhaps the most significant transformation, however, will be in the accessibility of justice,” CJI Surya Kant said.
He also pondered the changes taking place in the nature of disputes themselves, speculating that in times ahead courts would face the challenge of dealing with issues of synthetic biology, digital sovereignty, decentralized autonomous organizations, and new environmental offences, like ecocide. He pointed out that, fifty years hence, a much wider scope of exploration might lie in areas of fundamental duties as compared to fundamental rights. In his view, the ideal judge of the future must be proficient in science, ethics and society alike.
Towards the end, the Chief Justice returned to the Constitution as a living document. He noted that the framers designed it not to anticipate every future circumstance, but to provide a framework strong enough to accommodate change without losing its essential character. The fulcrum of continuity, he argued, lies in values such as the rule of law, separation of powers, and the independence of the judiciary, alongside the guarantees of fundamental freedoms and the ethical commitments of those who serve the law.