FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN CONTRACT LAW. Edited by KV Krishnaprasad, Niranjan Venkatesan, Shivprasad Swaminathan and Umakanth Varottil. OUP, Oxford (2024) lx and 544 pp plus 26 pp Index. ISBN 9780198893752. Hardback £175.

The (Indian) Contract Act of 1872 was part of a massive exercise in legal codification which roughly coincided with the final transfer of governmental responsibility for India from the terminally ramshackle East India Company to the United Kingdom. So far as private law is concerned, the project also produced the Evidence Act 1872, the Specific Relief Act 1877, the Trusts Act 1882 and the Transfer of Property Act 1882, as well as a Code of Civil Procedure 1859 (re-made in 1908). These have proved to be durable, and not only in India; but the Contract Act is perhaps the most remarkable. Even so, it might be said to have three shortcomings. First, it has a number of provisions which are problematic, but problematic in a way which really means that solutions that feel as though they will work have to be found outside and infiltrated into the Act. Second, the effect of its being litigated in India, never mind beyond, is the production of an enormous and vigorous jurisprudence from the various states and the Supreme Court (and beyond: the Act applies in Malaysia, which is covered in one chapter and mentioned in others, but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh, which appear to be passed over in silence). It is not possible to fit all the pieces together like the pieces of a giant jigsaw; and, as the Supreme Court does not consider itself bound by anything it has said, there is considerable fluidity in the law. Third, writing about the Act has tended to produce volumes, of which Pollock & Mulla, The Indian Contract and Specific Relief Acts, now in its 16th edition, is the exemplar. These resemble the Supreme Court Practice (White Book) far more than Chitty on Contracts, being organised as a compilation of reported decisions, including English decisions, sorted by reference to section, sub-section or phrase, but containing less in terms of doctrinal writing. By contrast, this handsome collection contains 23 essays (four on “general themes”, 15 on core contract topics, and four on non-core contracts), plus a summary, all aimed at responding to the third of these deficiencies; and by and large it does it very well. It is because the essays are all so thoroughly interesting that it would be inappropriate to identify individual authors by name.

For an Indian audience, the essays offer a variety of reflections on the operation of the Act, with significant analysis of how it got to be as it is, and how it could be made better: the concluding summary, by the indomitable Professor Beale, is excellent. The general approach of the Indian courts appears to have been to regard the provisions of the Act, or some of them at least, as a point of departure or as a fallback but not as a straitjacket, leaving them free to look to the common law world beyond India for guidance as to what