A Historical Introduction to Indian Contract Law

This book offers a genealogy of the core concepts of Indian contract law, tracing their trajectory from the nineteenth century soil of English jurisprudence in which they germinated, to their transplantation into the Indian Contract Act 1872, and the interpretation of the provisions containing these concepts by Indian courts and influential treatise-writers, over the last one hundred and fifty years.

The concepts studied by the book are: i) formation; ii) consideration; iii) privity; iv) capacity; v) consent; vi) frustration; vii) damages viii) stipulated sums; and ix) unjustified enrichment. With respect to each of these concepts, the book seeks to provide an account of the state of the English law at the eve of the drafting of the Act, with a particular emphasis on the impact the civil law had on the concept and a close study of the legislative history of the provisions of the Act codifying the concept, with a view to uncovering what the drafters had originally envisaged.

Based on extensive doctrinal and archival research, the book offers:

• a historical background to the drafting of the Indian Contract Act and the codification process
• a jurisprudential exploration of the limitations of common law codification gleaned from the working of the Act
• the draft of the contract code accompanying the report of the Indian Law Commissioners in 1866, which is essential to understand the intention of the drafters of the Act
• historical insights which hold the key to illuminating contemporary contract law problems of the kind courts routinely grapple with