Trials, Witnesses, and Local Stakes in a District Court of Himachal Pradesh (India)
Résumé
The paper analyses how a specific form of village solidarity takes shape within the urban- and State-centred context of a district court of justice. Ethnographic observations of a Session court in Mandi, a small town in Himachal Pradesh, throw light on the various ways in which the court system, due to its very judicial procedures and its legal interpretation of facts, is constantly confronted with, and sometimes hindered by village-based forms of belonging. I will take as example a criminal case registered under section 20 of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. Whilst setting the case in a wider cultural context at regional level, I will concentrate my analyses on the court proceedings in order to see how village dynamics of this kind are expressed during the trial, and how far the judge manages to disregard them in his search for the judicial truth.
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