Tales of Restoration: A Study of the Evacuee Property Laws

One of the ways scholars and lawyers have understood the institution of property is by thinking of it in terms of legal relationships that people share with each other with respect to a thing. The primary question that animates this article is as follows: If property is to be understood as relationships, what sort of relationships did the evacuee property legislations, a post-Partition legal instrument invented to deal with the problem of abandoned properties left behind in the wake of mass migration, foster among different groups of people with each other and with the state? In order to answer this question, this article explores the newspaper records, parliamentary debates, court orders and archives of the case files of property restoration requests made to the quasi-judicial office of the Custodian of Evacuee Properties present in the National Archives of India.