The Price of Justice: The Bombay Legal Aid Society and the Birth of the Legal Aid Movement in Colonial India

Abstract

The history of legal aid in South Asia has hitherto been restricted to appendages or short overviews in writings orientated towards its contemporary. This article offers the first archivally grounded study of the birth of the legal aid movement in early twentieth-century colonial India, focusing specifically on the Bombay Legal Aid Society. It pursues three major lines of inquiry. First, I consider the transnational intellectual networks between India and America upon which early Indian legal aid thinking developed. Second, I tackle the fraught politics of doing legal aid in interwar Bombay, a period marked by anticolonial nationalism and strong trade union organizing. Finally, the article examines why the BLAS succeeded in building strong working relationships with existing social welfare societies, state institutions, and like-minded legal professionals, but failed to garner considerable interest from the working classes it sought to serve. I argue that these struggles point to the hard limits of legal aid in the colony but also present a valuable window into the Bombay working classes' legal consciousness. The article thus contributes to ongoing efforts at globalizing the history of legal aid and to the small but growing study of the legal profession in colonial South Asia.