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Since the late 1990s, there has been an explosion of scholarship on South Asian legal history. This article situates the new literature within the longer tradition of postcolonial South Asian legal studies, focusing on work written by lawyers and historians. The first wave of South Asian legal studies emerged in what historians would call the long 1960s from a group of American lawyers and social scientists working on the legal profession and the experience of dispute resolution in India. The second wave, which has concentrated on the themes of gender and religion in British India, has been shaped by different influences, namely developments in the Indian women's movement and in Indian legal education during the 1980s and 1990s. The survey considers whether the new scholarship is overly focused on elites, the state, the colonial period, and English-language sources. It also identifies regional crosscutting themes that have generated research on South Asia beyond India, particularly constitutionalism, states of emergency, and the legal profession; Buddhist legal studies; gender; and rule-of-law development efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an effort to understand the position taken by the celebrated seventeenth-century Chishtī Sufi 'Abd al-Rahman Chishtī in his Mir'at al-Asrar, a hagiographical dictionary (tazkira) of past Sufi holy men. I have read this tazkira together with 'Abd al-Rahman's other writings but focused in particular on his long preface to this work in which he elaborates his definition of tasawwuf and asks what the real religion of the Sufi should be. 'Abd al-Rahman also undertakes a far-reaching reassessment of key elements in the wider traditions of Indian Islam. Drawing on a range of Indian and Middle Eastern influences, he rejects the narrow law-centred formulation of the Naqshbandīs and offers a distinctive vision of Chishtī spiritual support at the heart of the Mughal political order. His work opens up for us the wider landscape of religious debate and contestation that characterized Indian Islam during the Mughal era, which later generations of historians have overlooked in their preoccupation with more 'conservative' strains of Muslim thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]