Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...building in New Delhi last week, earnest men from 53 nations quietly undertook a task of more potential importance to 20th century man than the cracking of the atom or the exploration of space. Their goal: to foster the rule of law throughout the world by denning the minimum legal safeguards that all men everywhere could reasonably demand of their governments...
...women ever since his teens, when his doting mother began giving him beautiful girls as birthday presents. As a devout Moslem, he had four legal wives as well as 42 zenana companions, who have all the benefits and privileges of marriage except legality. With the help of legal wives, begums, concubines and birthday presents, the Nizam has sired more than 50 children...
...wedding had a special meaning for another of the Nizam's offspring, Shahazadi Pasha, his eldest daughter by a legal wife. She had also been betrothed to a nawab long ago, but the Nizam abruptly canceled the wedding when he was warned by a passing holy man that he would not long survive her marriage. Shahazadi Pasha, now a 40-year-old spinster, often used to drive around Hyderabad with her father in one or another of the old cars he thriftily uses, but she is seldom seen any more...
...sister and brother-in-law tell the story behind the commotion. Eight years before, they adopted an unwanted, illegitimate Indian infant and raised him as one of their own family. Now the Indian father, a merchant, is demanding him back, and missionaries and merchants are grappling in a legal battle that dredges up the deepest, ugliest emotions...
...missionaries' case is short and plain: they have every moral right, as well as a good legal one, to keep the child. But Author White sympathetically presents the Indian father's case. Alagarsami, the merchant, is not an independent man but an obligated member of a tradition-bound family. Eight years before, he was uninterested in the fruit of his night out with a servant girl; since then his wife has died childless, and Alagarsami must get himself an heir or see his birthright handed to a relative. In his own mind Alagarsami is battling for Mother India...