“Swearing to God”: A Study on Dispute Resolution Process in Kodinhi Juma Masjid in Kerala

The thesis offers an insightful ethnographic account of dispute resolutions and the practice of oath-taking at the Juma Masjid in Kerala that is associated with Maṃburam Tangal (d. 1845), a Sufi-scholar from Hadramaut. The study is based on two months of fieldwork and draws on a rich archive, which includes records of oaths taken, litigant petitions, and mediation notes. It presents Kodinhi Juma Masjid as a distinctive Islamic legal institution, where the dispute settlement forum operates in stages – first, dispute settlement through mediation, and second, dispute settlement through oath-taking. The study discusses its operation under the maḥall committee, a community organisation based on Juma mosques, an unacknowledged Islamic nonstate legal actor in secular India. The first chapter focuses on the dispute settlement process in the forum and traces a “radical legal pluralism” in an ostensibly secular postcolonial India. Cases brought before the maḥall committee were examined in detail, enabling this study to conclude that its jurisdictional authority overlaps with the state judicial system not only in the personal law domain but also in criminal cases. Consideration was then given to how its role widens the understanding of secularism and the postcolonial state structure in India. The second chapter focuses on oath-taking and explores the enduring question of divine agency in which the whole system of adjudication is structured. By discussing the oath-swearing ceremony as a disruptive divine moment in the legal forum, the study renegotiates the existing dominant ethical frameworks – self-cultivation and discursive tradition – in the anthropology of Islam and rediscovers a much broader paradigm of ethics in which the legal practices take place.