Development of Judiciary in British India

In the India of pre-colonial times—in the Mughal era or even prior to that (including the ancient period)—the judicial system, as a whole, neither adopted proper procedures nor had proper organisation of the law courts—in a regular gradation from the highest to the lowest—nor had any proper

distribution of courts in proportion to the area to be served by them. The bulk of the litigation among the Hindus was decided by caste elders or village panchayats or zamindars. For Muslims, the unit of judicial administration was the qazi—an office held by religious persons—located in provincial capitals, towns and qasbas (large villages). The rajas and badshahs were considered as the fountainhead of justice, and the process of dispensing justice could be arbitrary.

The beginning of a common law system, based on recorded judicial precedents, can be traced to the establishment of ‘Mayor’s Courts’ in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta in 1726 by the East India Company. With the Company’s transformation from a trading company into a ruling power, new elements of judicial system replaced the existing Mughal legal system. A brief survey of those changes has been discussed below.