Chakravarty-Kaul, Minoti. 1991. "Common Property Resources, Customary Law and Rural Self-Governing Institutions in the Colonial North India." Presented at Second Annual Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, September 19-26, 1991.

Abstract

"This paper attempts to follow the Colonial government's efforts to integrate nineteenth-century customary usages in rural Punjab into a system of Customary Law. This was a bid to rule the people by their own laws. Codification of customs and customary usages which regulated common lands in the Punjab villages provides a window to observe the transformation of institutions of self-governance as a result of the modernising influence of the Colonial Government."