Speaking in Multiple Registers

The framework of legal pluralism has conventionally posed customary norms against official Hindu law and prioritizes inheritance law as the only systemic mode for the transmission of family property. It has led to a scholarly neglect of the practices of gift and contract, which the author sees as alternative modes of sharing/devolving property to kin with weak inheritance rights. The chapter traces how, below the judicial radar, compensation for caregiving through gift and contract constituted a common ground of argument and negotiation among peasant litigants of the Garhwal Himalayas in the early twentieth century. It recovers ideas of normative justice through litigants’ speech, which never found their way into the corpus juris of either Hindu Law or custom.