In this Article, I examine jurisprudence textbooks and related works written in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the jurisprudential works from India were not merely summaries of the leading English books, but were different from English works in three senses. First, the gap between English theories and Indian legal realities led some authors to question key English notions about the nature and development of law. Second, some of the works produced in India were more influenced by Continental and American legal theories than the equivalent English textbooks. Sometimes this was due to the fact that the authors of these works had some Continental training, and sometimes the non-English influence reflected a wider anticolonial nationalist move away from English culture. Finally, the influence of nationalism also led some Indian legal scholars to create a unique genre of jurisprudential works: Texts that used Western jurisprudential theories to describe the main features of Hindu (and, to a lesser extent, also Islamic) law. These unique aspects of colonial jurisprudential works illustrate a broader phenomenon: the fact that legal scholars in imperial peripheries such as India were not always simply passive receivers of ideas produced at the center of empires, but in some cases created works containing interesting jurisprudential insights. The notion that India was a “legal laboratory” in which legal scholars experimented with new ideas has already been discussed in the literature, largely based on examples taken from the fields of legislation (the codification of English law in nineteenth-century India) or forensic science. This Article explores the extent to which India was also a site of jurisprudential innovation.

中文翻译：

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殖民地法律实验室？英属印度的法学创新

在本文中，我研究了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初在英属印度编写的法学教科书和相关著作。来自印度的一些法学著作不仅是对主要英文著作的概括，而且在三个意义上都不同于英文著作。首先，英国理论与印度法律现实之间的差距导致一些作者质疑英国关于法律性质和发展的关键概念。其次，在印度制作的一些作品比同等的英语教科书更受大陆和美国法律理论的影响。有时这是因为这些作品的作者受过一些大陆训练，有时非英语的影响反映了更广泛的反殖民民族主义远离英国文化。最后，民族主义的影响还导致一些印度法律学者创造了一种独特的法学作品类型：使用西方法学理论来描述印度教（以及在较小程度上还包括伊斯兰教）法律的主要特征的文本。殖民法学著作的这些独特方面说明了一个更广泛的现象：在印度等帝国外围地区的法律学者并不总是被动地接受帝国中心产生的思想，但在某些情况下，他们创作的作品包含有趣的法学见解。文献中已经讨论了印度是法律学者尝试新思想的“法律实验室”的概念，主要基于立法（19 世纪印度对英国法律的编纂）或法医学领域的例子。本文探讨了印度在多大程度上也是法学创新的场所。