What makes a law colonial? India’s oldest statutes still live on

In April this year, the Supreme Court travelled back to a piece of New Delhi in 1945.

A perpetual lease had been executed on April 26 that year by the Governor General in Council in favour of Sardar Bahadur Sir Sobha Singh & Sons Private Limited. It covered land at North and South Sujan Singh Park and contemplated the construction of residential flats.

Then came August 15, 1947.

“Upon Independence, the appellant stepped into the shoes of the original lessor,” the Supreme Court observed in Union of India v Sir Sobha Singh and Sons Pvt Ltd (2026). The “appellant” was the Union of India, which had inherited the position once occupied by the colonial government.

Eighty-one years after the lease was signed and 79 years after Independence, the Court was still required to determine rights flowing from it. More strikingly, it did so by applying the Government Grants Act, 1895.

The case offers an unusual vantage point from which to look at India's legal inheritance on the eve of its 80th Independence Day. Colonial laws are usually discussed when Parliament repeals one, a court strikes one down, or a government promises to “decolonise” the statute book. The Supreme Court's everyday docket tells a more complicated story.

A law from 1891 leaves, others stay

The immediate peg comes from Parliament.

On August 10, the Rajya Sabha passed the Bankers' Books Evidence Bill, 2026, after the Lok Sabha had cleared it on August 5. The Bill seeks to replace the Bankers' Books Evidence Act, 1891, a law enacted when bank records meant ledgers, cash books, and other physical records. Parliament's website records the Bill as passed by both Houses.

At first sight, it looks like a neat example of an independent country finally clearing out colonial legislation.

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Except that the 1891 Act had itself travelled a considerable distance from its original form. The Information Technology Act, 2000 expressly amended the Bankers' Books Evidence Act so that the law could accommodate electronic records. Independent India had already begun modifying the colonial statute for a digital economy more than two decades ago.

That history raises a more interesting question than how many British-era laws remain: what exactly makes a law “colonial”?

The nineteenth century in a 2026 courtroom

A review of Supreme Court judgments delivered this year shows that statutes enacted under British rule continue to regulate some thoroughly contemporary disputes.

In M/s Saisudhir Energy Ltd v M/s NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam Ltd (2026), for instance, the Court had to decide how much compensation was payable for delay in commissioning a solar power project. At the heart of a dispute involving modern renewable energy infrastructure was Section 74 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, which governs compensation when contracts specify an amount payable for breach.

The Act remains India's basic law of contracts. India Code still lists the legislation enacted on April 25, 1872 as the statute defining and amending the law relating to contracts.

In April, the Supreme Court decided Renuka v State of Maharashtra (2026), involving a dishonoured cheque for Rs 50 crore. The case turned on Sections 138 and 139 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, including the legal presumption that a cheque was issued towards a debt or liability unless the person who issued it proves otherwise.

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The Transfer of Property Act dates to 1882. The Government Grants Act followed in 1895. The General Clauses Act came in 1897, the Code of Civil Procedure and Registration Act in 1908, and the Indian Succession Act in 1925. All have continued to appear in Supreme Court litigation.

Of these, the Code of Civil Procedure is particularly instructive. Enacted in 1908, it remains the basic rulebook governing how civil lawsuits move through courts, from jurisdiction and filing of suits to appeals and execution of decrees. India Code continues to list it as an enforced Central law.

Calling such a statute a “colonial relic” tells us when it was enacted. It tells us much less about what the law has become.

The Sujan Singh Park paradox

The Sujan Singh Park dispute shows the harder side of that inheritance.

The Government Grants Act gives special force to the conditions imposed in grants of land made by the government. The Supreme Court held in April that the terms of the 1945 grant governed the relationship and that ordinary rent-control law could not be used to evict the Union government from the premises. It allowed the Union's appeal, while leaving the private party free to pursue other civil remedies.

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Here, the continuity is almost physical. A grant made by the colonial state passed to the Indian state at Independence. The legal regime created to protect government grants survived as well. A court of the Republic was called upon in 2026 to determine the consequences.

But even that does not establish that every provision of the 1895 law should be rejected merely because of its origin. The question is whether the power it confers, and the way that power operates today, are compatible with the constitutional order India adopted after Independence.

That is a much more demanding test than looking at the date printed at the top of an Act.

Decolonisation cannot be a calendar exercise

The most visible recent exercise in rewriting India's inherited legal framework came on July 1, 2024, when the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam came into force, replacing the Indian Penal Code of 1860, the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1973, and the Indian Evidence Act of 1872 respectively.

The government presented the overhaul as part of an effort to shed the colonial imprint on the criminal justice system. The description, however, requires some care: while the IPC and the Evidence Act were colonial enactments, the CrPC being replaced was enacted in independent India in 1973, although it carried forward a system of criminal procedure with colonial antecedents. The continued operation of much older civil and commercial statutes therefore raises a larger question: does decolonisation necessarily require replacing an old law, or should the test be the purpose and effect of the law in the constitutional order today?

Some colonial legislation was expressly designed to protect the authority of an imperial state over its subjects. Other enactments codified areas such as contracts, property, succession, commercial transactions, and court procedure. Independent India amended many of them repeatedly, discarded portions, adapted terminology, and subjected them to constitutional review.

There is also a second afterlife. Even when an old statute is repealed, cases arising while it was in force can remain in the judicial system for years. Repeal therefore changes the law prospectively much faster than it clears the courts of the old law.

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The passage of the Bankers' Books Evidence Bill just before Independence Day is therefore significant for a reason beyond its 1891 ancestry. It shows Parliament deciding that the older framework has reached the point where amendment is no longer sufficient, and replacement is preferable.

Other nineteenth-century statutes face no comparable existential crisis. The Contract Act is being applied to solar projects. The Negotiable Instruments Act governs cheque transactions. The Code of Civil Procedure structures litigation across the country.

Independence transferred law-making authority from an imperial legislature to institutions created by India's Constitution. It did not require every rule made before August 15, 1947 to disappear on that date.

Seventy-nine years later, a more useful measure of legal decolonisation may therefore be to ask two questions of an inherited law: what purpose did it originally serve, and what purpose does it serve now?

The Supreme Court's 2026 docket suggests that the distance between those answers can sometimes be far greater than the age of the statute itself.