On July 16, 1858, only six weeks after the Bellary District Court had ruled in Charlotte’s favor, Francis appealed his case to the Sadr Adalat in Madras. This court heard appeals originating within all of the lower courts of the mofussil. In his letter of appeal, Francis stated that the law of inheritance applicable to the Abrahams is the law for undivided Hindu families. He maintained that he and Matthew had always considered themselves to be undivided brothers. This chapter presents a detailed description of Francis’s appeal. It includes a discussion of Hindu law, the conventions of the Sadr Adalat, Francis’s selection of legal counsel and witnesses, and his key arguments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the decree and rationale of the Sadr Adalat.

At the Sadr Adalat, Francis’s attorneys were able to match a highly simplified rendition of Hindu law with a particular kind of Christian experience. A central observation being made in this chapter concerns the process of simplification, which created a “user-friendly” Hindu law for courts to administer loosely and broadly. A Hindu law of inheritance was extracted from a complex history of textual interpretation and debates among legal reformers. What resulted was a simplified law, a distillate, which the Sadr Adalat applied to the Abrahams. It rested almost entirely on a distinction between labor springing from familial obligation and that arising from a contractual relationship between an employer and a paid agent. This law was then matched with the “class” of Christians into which the Abraham brothers were born – Roman Catholic converts (and their descendants) who retained their caste traditions and whose families continued to share property between their male members. In spite of the fact that the brothers had become Protestants, Francis selected as witnesses large numbers of Roman Catholic converts to illustrate his and Matthew’s own approach to the division of property (as illustrated in the preceding chapter).