Thousands of law students from across the British Empire (particularly India) attended London’s Inns of Court to become elite courtroom lawyers or barristers circa 1900. Their time at the Inns was as much about socialization into an imperial profession as it was about the acquisition of technical skills. This chapter explores the limits of the imperial lawyering project through Inner Temple disciplinary proceedings against two South Asians. The unusual cases of pseudo-Theosophist A.K. Ghose and nationalist revolutionary Shyamji Krishnavarma shed light on the imperial legal profession’s views of race, mendacity, education, and colonialism. Redemption was a central theme in both cases, whether as a key part of the individual’s own narrative (Ghose) or as a way of reinterpreting the case a century later (Krishnavarma).
Bibliographic Citation
Mitra Sharafi, South Asians at the Inns of Court: Empire, Expulsion, and Redemption circa 1900, in In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries (Kenneth W. Mack & Jacob Katz Cogan eds., 2024).
