Atharva Sontakke

Profile

Thesis title

Reception of Legal Transplants in Postcolonoial States: Interaction between Liberal Constitutionalism and Hinduism in India (tentative)

Supervisors

• Dr Prakash Shah
• Dr John Adenitire

Summary of research

In recent years constitutional democracies across the world have witnessed two overarching trends. First, there has been a proliferation of conflicts between law and religion especially in Asian contexts where the much-popularized secularization thesis never materialised fully. Second, increasing reliance has been placed on the ability of liberal constitutionalism to manage such conflicts. In this background, this thesis aims to study how ideas of liberal constitutionalism have been received in non-Western contexts through the case study of India. This study contributes to the existing scholarship on law and religion and constitutional law by developing an analytical framework to understand how constitutional law shapes the categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ in a Hindu culture. It also aims to identify and analyse the impact of the legal construction of these categories on questions of religious freedom in relation to Hindu traditions and practices and examine whether ‘constitutionalizing’ Hinduism results in enhancing religious freedom and diversity or enforcing uniformity. The focus of this enquiry will be limited to issues of religious freedom in post-independence India where the reformative and transformative impulses of the Constitution of India conflict with Hindu religious traditions and practices and to investigate how claims of secular-liberal constitutionalism nested in human rights frameworks interact with Hinduism in the postcolonial constitutional framework.

Biography

Atharva is currently enrolled in the PhD in Law program at Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London under the supervision of Dr Prakash Shah and Dr John Adenitire. Previously, Atharva worked as Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, India for 4 years where he instructed undergraduate students in the areas of Intellectual Property Law and Constitutional Law.

Atharva has been awarded the Graduate Teaching Assistantship award for his doctoral studies at Queen Mary.

Atharva has completed his LLM from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2018 where he studied at the Department of Law and Deparment of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method. He also holds a first-class undergraduate degree in Law and Science from Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar in India.  

Apart from law, Atharva enjoys reading philosophy, religion, politics and fiction.

Research