Contemporary shifts in legal pluralism theory (from weak, intra-state pluralism to strong, extra-state pluralism and from socio-scientific to critical legal pluralism) have raised important new questions about law as a normative phenomenon. This article argues for the significance of implicit and inferential legal norms. It begins by considering a movement of thought—evangelicalism—that subordinates the implicit and informal to the explicit and authorized. The essay then outlines the principal features of a non-chirographic legal pluralism and explores how regimes of written rules are consistently made over by those whose conduct they are presumptively meant to govern.

The Uniform Civil Code which, as written in the 1950 Constitution of the Indian Union, should be enacted, still does not (and will probably never) exist. This paper examines the tactics used by the opponents in the Constituent and Legislative Assembly (1946-1951) who succeeded to wreck a proposed “modernisation” of the Hindu Personnal Law, which could have been a first step towards that Uniform Code. In a very clever way, they never claimed to defend the dharma treatises which had codified and legitimated a Brahmanical Social Order for centuries, but only wanted to maintain the multiplicity and diversity of customs and usages of the Hindu people.