Legal Pluralism as a Necessity: The Difficulty of Adjudicating Land Disputes in India

The literature on legal pluralism highlights the presence of multiple legal systems in a social field as a ‘reality’. Works on forum shopping and shopping forums inform us about the choices that disputants and forums have, in choosing forums and disputes respectively, for a favourable outcome. Drawing from my research on land disputes in the northern part of India, I argue that these legal systems are singularly insufficient to resolve contentious land disputes. Therefore, they should be seen as inadequate parts of a larger legal arena where the plurality of legal systems become a ‘necessity’. This plurality provides an answer to the difficulties faced by state and non-state legal systems in resolving land disputes. This necessity of the plurality of the legal arena in cases of land disputes should be grappled with by comprehending how land is positioned in a complex of social, political, and economic relations. Unless this position of land is grasped and addressed, a solution to land disputes seems difficult to reach. Through an ethnographic study of the accounts of a dispute between two neighbours — Ramvilas Yadav and Sanjay Sav — I show the insufficiency of both the formal legal system of the state and the non-state adjudicating mechanism of the village.