The relation between custom and dharma, between people's law and state law, underwent fundamental change during the colonial period.

Both administrative exigencies and high colonial policy made non-interference with religiously based law a desideratum. But such a policy could not immunize the existing laws from fundamental change, especially when colonial authority had to create a national legal system for the governance of the country. Such a system, naturally, “affected the balance between divergent indigenous legal traditions” (Rudolph & Rudolph, 1967: 269). The story of how those changes occurred has been meticulously told by many, but perhaps most authoritatively by Duncan Derrett (1968: 225–320; see also Rudolph & Rudolph, 1967; Jain, 1966; Galanter, 1964). It should suffice here to stress briefly a few distinctive aspects of the transition.