Ritual Presence and Legal Persons. Deities and the Law in India

Daniela Berti (1, 2)

1 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
2 CESAH - Centre d'études sud asiatiques et himalayennes

The idea of considering gods as legal persons who can sue or be sued in a court of law has often been presented by both judicial milieus and academic literature as a legal fiction which allows gods to be granted the ownership of material property and to be the recipient of donations. But the involvement of a god in a court case has wide- ranging implications going far beyond the issue of temple property and with a direct impact on ritual and temple practices. In my paper I first present some of the issues on which judges are called upon to decide regarding the question of the legal status of ritual images and how these decisions may have an impact on ritual activity; I then examine two cases which show how the question of a god's link to (or action on) natural resources may be raised in court and what legal and practical consequences it may entail.

Domains: Social Anthropology and ethnology; Humanities and Social Sciences

Daniela Berti. Ritual Presence and Legal Persons. Deities and the Law in India. In Anne de Sales & Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (eds) "Encounters with the Invisible. Revisiting Possession in the Himalayas in its Material and Narrative Aspects", In press. ⟨hal-03090603⟩