Magna Carta and the Fight for Rights in Colonial India
Erica Kim Ollikainen-Read explores how the ‘myth of Magna Carta’ travelled to India and was reinterpreted by the British colonisers and by the Indian people in their struggle with Britain as a colonial authority. In particular, the project examines Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation to the ‘Princes, Chiefs, and People of India’. This was considered by contemporaries to be ‘India’s Magna Carta’ and has recently been studied as a ‘constitutional antecedent’ to India’s modern constitutional history.