Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India

Nullius is an anthropological account of the troubled place of ownership and its consequences for social relations in India. The book provides a detailed study of three doctrinal paradigms where proprietary relations have been erased, denied, or misappropriated by the Indian state. It examines three instantiations of negation, where the Indian state de facto adopted the doctrines of terra nullius (in the erasure of indigenous title), res nullius (in acquiring museum objects), and, controversially, corpus nullius (in denying ownership of one’s personhood in citizens’ data collected through biometric identification).

Nullius contends that even though property rights and ownership are a cornerstone of modern law, they are a spectral presence in the Indian case. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the anthropology of the state, law, data, museums, legal history, intellectual property, cultural property, heritage, historical anthropology, and South Asia. It will also be of interest to non-academics working in the fields of data, data ethics, cultural property, intellectual property, and museum collections.

Author

Dr. Kriti Kapila

Kriti Kapila is lecturer in anthropology and law at the India Institute and the Department of Global Health and Medicine at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the work of law and the state in contemporary India. She is currently working on her monograph Indi-gene, based on long-term fieldwork on historical genetics and genomic medicine in India.

Chair

Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal

Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and presently also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies. Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015.

Discussants

Professor Debjani Bhattacharyya

Debjani Bhattacharyya is the Professor and Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at University Zürich. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Currently she is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania.  

Dr. Bhrigupati Singh

Bhrigupati Singh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Ashoka University, Visiting Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Brown University, and a Research Fellow at the Carney Institute for Brain Science. His first book, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (University of Chicago Press, Oxford University Press 2015) was awarded the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences by the American Institute of Indian Studies, an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion by the American Academy of Religion. He is currently working on a monograph titled Waxing and Waning Life based on long-term fieldwork in community psychiatry clinics in "resettlement" colonies in Delhi.  He is a co-editor of The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Duke University Press, Orient Blackswan 2014), and serves as co-editor of a book series, Thinking from Elsewhere (Fordham University Press).

Dr Rohit De

Rohit De is a lawyer and historian of modern South Asia at Yale University and focuses on the legal history of the Indian subcontinent and the common law world. Professor De’s book A People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press) explores how the Indian constitution, despite its elite authorship and alien antecedents, came to permeate everyday life and imagination in India during its transition from a colonial state to a democratic republic. He is current research focuses around two major strands; the histories of political lawyering and the nature of the postcolonial state in South Asia.