Animals, Rivers, and the Limits of Legal Personhood

The doctrine of juristic personality came into Indian law for a particular reason. A Hindu idol that had been installed in a family dwelling and worshipped for nearly a century could not, in the form of decaying bronze or stone, defend its own property, set the terms of its own ritual, or restrain the family members charged with its custody. The Privy Council's decision in Pramatha Nath Mullick v Pradyumna Kumar Mullick, delivered in April 1925, settled that the idol was a juristic entity — capable of owning, capable of suing, capable of being sued — and that the shebait stood as its guardian, with a 'next friend' available where the shebait's interests diverged from the idol's.¹ The doctrine fitted the problem. The deity occupied a single temple at a single address. The shebait was identifiable. The forum in which the deity's interests could be litigated was the family's local High Court. Ninety years on, the same doctrine has been asked to do work for which it was never designed. The Ganga has been declared a juristic person — a river that flows for more than two thousand kilometres across five States with no temple, no shebait, and no single forum. The bull in the Jallikattu arena has been declared the bearer of Article 21 rights. The doctrine, asked to carry weights this far above its original load, has begun to flex in revealing ways.

What the doctrine was built to do

Indian jurisprudence on juristic personality is, in its sharpest form, a doctrine about representation. The deity in Pramatha Nath Mullick had every classical attribute of a person except the ability to act through its own body. The Privy Council's response was structural rather than ontological. It did not ask whether the idol was 'really' a person. It asked who could speak for the idol, and on what terms. The shebait was the answer, with the qualification that the shebait's loyalty ran to the deity and not to the family — and that where the two diverged, the Court could and would appoint a next friend.

The doctrine, read this way, has a small set of internal requirements. The juristic entity must have an interest — somewhere on the spectrum between property, sanctity, and continuing identity — capable of being asserted or defended. There must be a representative whose loyalty to that interest is enforceable. There must be a forum in which the representative can be held to account. And there must be some principle by which the entity can be distinguished from the individuals who have charge of it, so that the entity's interests are not collapsed into theirs. Each of these conditions was met in the case of a temple deity. Each of them creates difficulties as the doctrine moves outward.

RWM Dias, surveying the European theories of legal personality, observes that no single theory takes account of all the work the doctrine has been asked to do.⁶ Brinz's purpose theory treats the corporate entity as a subjectless property pool. Ihering's bracket theory treats it as a notational convenience that brackets the members. Hohfeld treats it as an arbitrary procedural device. Kelsen treats it as the totality of duties and claims attributed to a special set of rules. Savigny's fiction theory says it is a useful pretence. Gierke's realist theory says the group really exists. Dias's conclusion is that English law has not committed itself to any of these — that courts proceed by policy, not by theory, and that the inconsistencies of the case law reflect this. India inherited that pragmatism along with the rest of the common-law method. The deity-as-juristic-person line — older in India than Pramatha Nath Mullick, with the 1925 ruling consolidating earlier Privy Council and Allahabad rulings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries⁸ — is Indian law's clearest exercise of it: a doctrine kept narrow, attached to a specific set of facts, applied without too much speculation about its philosophical grounding.

This is the doctrine the Indian courts have, over the last decade, asked to stretch.

The animal extension

The first stretch was the easier of the two. In Animal Welfare Board of India v A Nagaraja, decided in May 2014, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court banned Jallikattu and bullock-cart racing.³ Radhakrishnan J. did three things in the same paragraph that are worth separating. First, he extended Article 21 of the Constitution — 'protection of life and personal liberty' — to non-human animals, declaring that 'the term life in Article 21 has been read so as to mean something more than mere survival or animal existence' and that the same construction must apply to the animal. Second, he read the five internationally recognised freedoms for animals — freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, freedom to express normal behaviour, freedom from fear — into Section 3 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960. Third, he directed Parliament to amend the Act to provide deterrent penalties.

The extension drew on a coherent philosophical lineage that the judgment did not, in the main, cite. Joel Feinberg's 1974 essay on the rights of animals and unborn generations is the most rigorous version of the underlying argument.⁵ Feinberg's 'interest principle' holds that the subjects of rights are precisely those beings capable of having interests, and that interests can be compounded out of conations — out of conscious wishes, desires, appetites, urges, and so on. Mere things do not have interests; they have only the value others place on them. Animals, having appetites and aims, have interests in their own right. They can be represented by proxies who act on those interests. Therefore they can be bearers of rights. The 'animals cannot claim their own rights' objection collapses, on Feinberg's account, because the same objection would defeat the rights of infants and the comatose.

Nagaraja imports this conclusion without quite importing the philosophy. The judgment cites the Constitution's Article 51A(g) — the fundamental duty to have compassion for living creatures — and the Indian preference, traceable to Manu and to Buddhist and Jain sources, for a non-anthropocentric ethic. What it does not do is build the doctrinal architecture the conclusion requires. If animals are bearers of Article 21 rights, who is their representative? Through what procedure are those rights to be enforced? In what forum, and against what kinds of defendants? Nagaraja leaves these questions open. The Animal Welfare Board of India is mentioned as a stand-in, but the Board's statutory function is regulatory, not representative; it does not bring habeas corpus on behalf of a tortured bullock.

The point is sharpened by what came next. In 2017, the Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra legislatures amended the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act to restore Jallikattu and Kambala, treating them as cultural events exempt from the cruelty prohibition. The Supreme Court referred the constitutional validity of the amendments to a Constitution Bench. In Animal Welfare Board of India v Union of India (2023), a seven-judge bench upheld the amendments.¹³ The bench did not formally overrule Nagaraja's Article 21 reasoning. It noted that reasoning, treated it as descriptive rather than load-bearing, and decided the case on the regulatory question of whether the Tamil Nadu amendments adequately balanced cultural rights against animal welfare. The 2014 judgment's most striking doctrinal claim — that Article 21 protects the animal — was, in 2023, allowed to recede without ceremony.

This pattern is what the deity doctrine was designed to prevent. When the shebait drifts from the interests of the idol, the Court appoints a next friend. The animal under Article 21 has no equivalent. The 2014 declaration that Article 21 applies to animals created a right with no enforceable representative and no procedure of its own. When the legislative tide ran the other way in 2017, the right reduced to a doctrinal aside. The shebait device worked for a deity because the doctrine forced the structural question — who speaks for it, and against whom — to be answered up front. Article 21 for animals worked as long as the Court was inclined to apply it, and only that long.

The river extension — Mohd Salim and the speed at which the doctrine broke

The second stretch is the more revealing. On 20 March 2017, a Division Bench of the Uttarakhand High Court — Sharma and Singh JJ. — delivered judgment in Mohd Salim v State of Uttarakhand.² The case had begun as a public-interest litigation about illegal mining along the Ganga. The remedy the petitioner asked for was an injunction. The remedy the Court granted was something the petitioner had not asked for and the State had not anticipated: a declaration that 'the Rivers Ganga and Yamuna, all their tributaries, streams, every natural water flowing with flow continuously or intermittently of these rivers, are declared as juristic/legal persons/living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person'.

The reasoning ran by analogy. Hindu deities are juristic persons; the people of India have 'deep Astha' in the Ganga and Yamuna; therefore the rivers can also be juristic persons. The Court drew on the deity line — Yogendra Nath Naskar v CIT, the post-Pramatha Nath line of Supreme Court rulings — as the doctrinal anchor.⁷ It appointed the Director of Namami Gange, the Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand, and the Advocate-General of Uttarakhand as the rivers' 'loco parentis' guardians. Within seven days the Court issued a sequel order extending the declaration to the glaciers, meadows, forests, and wetlands of the Uttarakhand watershed.

The State of Uttarakhand moved the Supreme Court within weeks. Its concerns were not philosophical. If the Ganga were a juristic person whose representatives included the Uttarakhand Chief Secretary, then every act of pollution upstream in Uttar Pradesh, every dam-construction decision in Bihar, every effluent discharge by a paper mill in West Bengal could in principle be litigated as a tort against the river — with the Uttarakhand authorities exposed to claims in their personal capacity. The Supreme Court stayed the operation of the Uttarakhand judgment in July 2017. The river's juristic personality, on the official record, lasted four months.

What this short life reveals is exactly what the deity doctrine was designed to test for. The Whanganui legislation in New Zealand, passed the same year, took care to specify what the river was a legal person for, who represented it, and against whom.⁴ The Te Awa Tupua Act creates a body called Te Pou Tupua, composed of one Whanganui iwi nominee and one Crown nominee, that 'acts and speaks for and on behalf of Te Awa Tupua'. The river's legal capacity is exercised through this body alone. It does not have generalised tort liability. It does not stand in for every interest of every downstream community. The personhood is statutory, structured, and bounded. Mohd Salim, by contrast, declared a juristic personality with no statutory framework, no purpose-built representative, no defined forum, and no limit on the kinds of action that could be brought in the river's name.

The Indian doctrine and the New Zealand statute were doing different things. Te Awa Tupua was the resolution of a 170-year Maori land claim, settled through Parliament after a negotiated process with the iwi. Mohd Salim was a court order issued in a pollution PIL, without consultation with any of the downstream States, without parliamentary backing, and without the institutional scaffolding the doctrine needed to function. Taniya Malik's survey of the comparative river-personhood literature flags the same point: the jurisdictions that have made the doctrine work have done so legislatively, with attention to representation and enforcement; the jurisdictions that have done it by court order have produced declarations that read more like aspiration than law.

The interest principle and the limit of analogy

The philosophical strain in the river extension is visible if we run Feinberg's interest principle against it. An animal has interests — wishes, appetites, an integrated welfare. The interest principle gives it standing. A deity has, on the Indian doctrine, interests of a different kind — in its property, in its rituals, in its continuing identity as the entity at the temple. The interest principle is stretched here, but only by the move that Feinberg himself makes in his discussion of dead persons: the interest survives the absence of present consciousness, and the proxy speaks for what the entity wanted while it was capable of wanting.

A river does not have interests in this sense. It has a flow, a temperature, a sediment load, a biodiversity profile, a chemical composition. Each of these is measurable. Each of them can be valued by the human and non-human communities that depend on the river. The river itself has no preferences over them. The whole apparatus of conation — the wishes, the urges, the goals — that Feinberg builds the interest principle on, is absent. What people mean when they say a river has 'interests' is that there are interests in the river — interests of human communities, of riparian ecosystems, of downstream wildlife — that the legal system has so far protected inadequately.

This matters because the analogy to the deity case begins to falter. The deity's interests in the temple, the property, the ritual, are the interests the shebait must defend. The river's interests, on inspection, dissolve into the interests of other parties whose claims the legal system already recognises — fishermen, riparian villages, religious communities, the State as parens patriae of natural resources. To call the river a juristic person is to bundle these existing interests under a new label, with the implicit promise that the bundling will produce stronger protection. The promise may be redeemed by good doctrine and may not be. What it is not is a fact about the river.

Christopher Stone, whose 1972 essay launched the modern rights-of-nature literature, was honest about this.¹¹ Stone did not claim that natural objects had inherent interests in the conative sense. He claimed they could be assigned guardians the way corporations and human incompetents are, and that this institutional move would produce better environmental outcomes than the existing system, in which standing requirements often barred suits on behalf of damaged ecosystems. The argument was structural and pragmatic. Mohd Salim, and the Whanganui statute, and the Colombian Constitutional Court's Atrato decision, are best read as attempts at the same structural move.⁹ What separates them is whether they did the institutional work.

The doctrine that did the work — and the doctrine that did not

Three features distinguish the jurisdictions in which river-personhood has functioned as law from the jurisdictions in which it has remained gesture. The first is statutory backing. The Whanganui case rests on the Te Awa Tupua Act 2017. The Bangladesh case rests on the High Court Division's judgment in the Turag case, but operates against a constitutional public-trust doctrine and a statutory National River Conservation Commission that the Court designated as the in loco parentis guardian.¹⁰ Mohd Salim had neither.

The second is a defined representative. The Whanganui Act creates Te Pou Tupua with two named members and a specified remit. The Bangladesh Turag judgment names the NRCC and gives it a constitutional standing to litigate. Mohd Salim named three State functionaries — the Director of Namami Gange, the Chief Secretary, and the Advocate-General — whose principal duties already ran to the State and whose representative capacity for the river was unspecified. Whose claims they could bring, against whom, and on what schedule, the judgment did not say. The shebait doctrine required, as a minimum, that the representative's loyalty to the entity be enforceable. The Mohd Salim guardians had no specified loyalty and no specified enforceability.

The third is a bounded forum. The Whanganui Act specifies that Te Pou Tupua's actions are subject to the New Zealand High Court's jurisdiction in defined ways. The Bangladesh judgment operates within the writ jurisdiction of the High Court Division. Mohd Salim, by declaring the rivers and their tributaries to be juristic persons in the territory of Uttarakhand alone, while the rivers themselves flowed through several other States with their own High Courts, generated a forum problem the judgment did not anticipate. A pollution claim by the Ganga as juristic person against a polluter in Allahabad would lie, on the Mohd Salim declaration, in the Uttarakhand High Court. The Allahabad and Patna High Courts had not consented. The Supreme Court's stay was, among other things, a way of arresting the federal collision before it produced one.

None of this means river-personhood is a wrong idea. It means that the Indian doctrine of juristic personality, as it was developed for deities and absorbed for corporations, is a particular structural device with particular load-bearing requirements. Bend it past those, and the device fails not by error but by physical limit. The Mohd Salim judgment failed because it was asked to do without those requirements what the deity doctrine had always insisted upon. The 2023 Jallikattu judgment did not fail in the same way, because the Nagaraja Article 21 reasoning had never quite been turned into a representative-and-forum apparatus to begin with — there was, in 2023, no doctrinal structure left to break.

What the doctrine can still carry

The conclusion is not that Indian courts should retreat to a narrow doctrine of corporate personality alone. The deity line is a real expansion beyond Western corporate-person theory and has served Indian law adequately for a century. The Asiatic-lion case in 2013, treating the species as having interests the State was bound to protect through translocation, did real doctrinal work without overreaching.¹² The Sixth Schedule's recognition of customary collectives as legally significant is, in a different register, a related move. The Indian doctrine has more room in it than the Anglo-American corporate-only conception.

The question is what conditions a further extension has to satisfy. Three propositions follow from the deity line. First, the entity must have an interest separable from the interests of the human parties who interact with it — separable enough that the next-friend mechanism can be triggered when the human parties drift. Second, the doctrine must specify the representative, and the representative must be capable of being held to account by the courts. Third, the doctrine must specify the forum, and the forum must be capable of giving and enforcing the remedies the doctrine implies. A river-personhood declaration that does not satisfy these three is not a juristic person in the Pramatha Nath Mullick sense. It is an aspiration in juridical clothing.

The Whanganui Act satisfies the three. The Te Awa Tupua statute defines the river's legal personality, the body that exercises it, and the courts that hear actions involving it. The Bangladesh judgment satisfies them in a weaker form by designating an existing statutory body as guardian and operating in a defined writ jurisdiction. The Colombian Atrato judgment satisfies them by specifying a 'commission of guardians' composed of riparian community representatives and government officials, with defined functions. The 2017 Uttarakhand judgment satisfied none of the three. It is unsurprising, looking back, that the Supreme Court stayed it within four months.

Where the doctrine actually rests

The doctrine of juristic personality in Indian law sits in a particular place. It is a device of representation, developed for entities with interests of their own that human bodies cannot directly vindicate. It works when there is an entity, a representative, a forum, and a separable interest. It does not work — or works only declaratively, which is a different thing — when those four conditions fail.

The Pramatha Nath Mullick line did not contain an internal limit on what could be a juristic person. The deity could be a juristic person; nothing in the Privy Council's reasoning ruled out a wider class of entities. But the line did contain an internal requirement about how a juristic person had to be constituted — through a representative, an interest, and a forum, all specifiable by the court that conferred the status. Where the Uttarakhand High Court erred in 2017 was not in extending personhood to the river. It was in extending personhood to the river without specifying the apparatus the doctrine had always required.

The Nagaraja extension to animals is the cleaner case in some respects. The interest principle, on Feinberg's analysis, supplies the substantive ground; the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act supplies the statutory framework; the Animal Welfare Board, if statutorily empowered, could supply the representative. What is missing is the procedural architecture that would let a sentient animal's interests be litigated against the human parties whose treatment of it is in question. The 2023 Jallikattu judgment shows what happens when that architecture is missing: the right exists in principle and recedes in operation.

The Indian doctrine of juristic personality is older than the doctrine of corporate personhood in most jurisdictions and has accommodated entities — deities, mathas, devasthanams — that Anglo-American law would treat as trusts or foundations. That accommodation has not weakened the doctrine; it has shown what the doctrine can do. The question that the river and animal cases pose is not whether the doctrine has further to travel, but whether the Indian courts have been willing to do the institutional work that further travel requires. So far the answer has been mixed: willing in declaration, less willing in design. The doctrine is still doing its original job for the deity. The same doctrine will not do work for the river or the bull unless the design questions are answered first. They have not, so far, been answered.

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