Abstract
Laws governing religious endowments adjudicated how endowments would be governed and taxed, as well as what actually constituted religion and legitimate religious practice. While the Hindu endowment and Muslim waqf were recognized by colonial law, the tong, the Chinese endowment, in British Malaya and Hong Kong, was seen to go against the British rule against perpetuities. Although exceptions were made for religious charitable trusts in India, colonials in Hong Kong did not deem the tong as charitable or religious, relegating it to the world of family inheritance (private) or business and corporate law. Using both ethnographic and historical evidence, this chapter will show how endowments are at once shaped by secular law but also serve to contest and constitute the religious.
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- 1.
Literally a hall or ancestral hall, which denotes lineage estates (tang in Mandarin, tong in Cantonese) allowed families to build complex corporate land ownership structures within the idiom of filiality for ritual and ancestral veneration (Chung 2010: 1412).
- 2.
See Vevaina 2018, which traces the differing definitions of ‘the good’ for Parsi charitable trusts in India.
- 3.
King Edward I, enacted the Statutes of Mortmain in 1279 and 1290 to curb the property holdings of the Church.
- 4.
In 1844 with the Companies Act, business groups could incorporate without a royal charter, and in 1855 with limited liability. These laws were consolidated into the English Companies Act in 1862.
- 5.
Straits Law Reports, Heap Lee & Co. (1877).
- 6.
This verdict is also often cited for confirming that English law could and should be applied to the colonies.
- 7.
The text of this judgment can be found at https://www.ato.gov.au/law/view/print?DocID=JUD%2F/1875/6LRPC381%2F00002&PiT=99991231235958 (Accessed April 13, 2018).
- 8.
- 9.
See in particular Dossal (2010), Section 1. ‘Land into Private Property’.
- 10.
Sharafi (2014) cites: Davar in Tarachand 1909 and Petit 1909; Coyajee in Yezdiar 1950; Vachha in Irani 1966.
- 11.
- 12.
Sharafi (2014) devotes several chapters to Davar and his influence on these cases as well as the landmark Petit v. Jeejeebhoy (1908), which established that Parsi Zoroastrian identity was patrilineal.
- 13.
In all these cases, the definition of charitable benefit is taken from two related sources. The earliest is from the Statute of Elizabeth I, preamble, which is then enumerated by Lord McNaughten in 1891: (1) for the relief of poverty, (2) for the advancement of education, (3) for the advancement of religion, and (4) for other purposes beneficial to the community.
- 14.
Which is an exemption from gender discrimination statutes.
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Vevaina, L. (2019). Adjudicating the Sacred: The Fates of “Native” Religious Endowments in India and Hong Kong. In: Dean, K., van der Veer, P. (eds) The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89369-3_12
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