The Legal Centre for History of South India is one of the vibrant research centres in the Tamil Nadu National Law University, Tiruchirappalli. It was established with the financial support of the government of Tamil Nadu in 2021. The centre aims to promote the knowledge of legal history by engaging in research projects; organising academic programmes such as seminars, workshops, and conferences; and collecting manuscripts related to the colonial and pre-colonial legal culture of South India in general and the Tamil region in particular. The centre has published the following books as part of its broader project.
Rewriting history is an important integral part of history writing in modern times. History writing in contemporary India attempts to address the problems posed by the stereotyped histories produced by colonial historians in the 19 and 20 centuries. Indian legal history, like other branches of history, is also very much in need of such treatment. th th Legal history as a discipline emerged in the nineteenth century. In India, it was the colonial scholars who first attempted to produce legal history to support and strengthen British colonial rule during that same century. Historians such as James Mills and others extensively depended upon Sanskrit or Brahmanical sources and ignored others. When nationalist historians emerged to respond to colonial interpretations and support the Indian Nationalist Movement, scholars such as K.P. Jayaswal and a few others attempted to rewrite Indian legal history using newly discovered sources such as the secular Arthashastra. Marxist historians in India did not pay much attention to Indian legal history since they concentrated on the social and economic aspects of Indian history. Historians who belong to the later schools such as the subaltern and feminist, are currently showing interest in the subject, as they view that the legal reforms introduced by the British greatly affected the disempowered social groups in Indian society. Still, there is a wider gap in the discipline and many areas remain untouched even today. The Legal Centre for History of South India, Tamil Nadu National Law University, Tiruchirappalli, which was founded to explore and propagate the legal ideas of South India, initiates this conference to contribute to this field, with a specific focus on the Tamil region.