‘All the Lordships left in 1947’? — The philosophy of address

When Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, recently questioned the use of colonial-era terms such as “My Lord” in courtrooms and “prayers” in petitions, reportedly calling them relics of a bygone age, his argument found wide resonance. “You cannot have a profession where you use words like ‘My Lord’, or when you’re doing a petition you use the term ‘prayer’. It is not appropriate for one citizen to call another citizen ‘My Lord’ or pray to them,” he reportedly said.

The point, on the surface, appears unassailable. In a republic founded on equality before law, no citizen bows before another. But as with all symbols that have outlived their origins, meaning evolves. To interpret “My Lord” only through its colonial genealogy is to flatten centuries of civilisational layering that infuse Indian jurisprudence with philosophical depth.

For in our tradition, the judge is not a lord; he is a Nyāya-Mūrti — the living embodiment of justice. “Nyāya” is justice; “Mūrti” is form or manifestation. The address “My Lord”, when spoken voluntarily and consciously, need not echo subservience to empire. It can also signify reverence for the ideal that justice represents — not the person who wields it, but the principle he or she must serve.

Law, at its purest, is a moral enterprise. It aspires to translate the eternal idea of fairness into the temporal grammar of governance. The judge, therefore, is not sovereign; he is the instrument through whom justice manifests. In this sense, the courtroom, too, is not merely a hall of procedure — it is a "temple of justice", a sacred space where truth is tested, liberty protected, and order restored. The very architecture of our courts reflects this sanctity — the judge seated on an elevated dais, not to dominate but to signify detachment, neutrality, and moral height.

Every civilisation has found language to consecrate this process. The robes, the oaths, the solemnities of address — these are not mere ornaments of hierarchy, but reminders of restraint and humility. When a lawyer rises and says “My Lord”, he does not — or should not — genuflect before power. He affirms that what unfolds in that courtroom is larger than the litigants, larger than the judge, larger than the State.

Stripping the institution of every symbol of reverence, in the name of equality, risks mistaking egalitarianism for erasure. A republic does not become less democratic because it bows, in spirit, to the ideal of justice. The Constitution itself begins with an invocation — “We, the People…” — an act both declarative and sacred. The language of “prayer” in petitions flows from the same moral stream: it is not a supplication to authority but an appeal to conscience. We use the expression “prayer” for what we seek — we pray for directions, for relief, for justice — much like we pray to God for guidance. It is all part of the same divine continuum that binds the moral and the legal.

It is, therefore, possible — even necessary — to move away from colonial compulsion without discarding the civilisational reverence embedded in our own idiom. To address a judge as “My Lord”, if done by choice, is not to yield to subservience but to acknowledge that the function of judging partakes, in some measure, of the divine. Justice, after all, is not a mere administrative act; it is a moral awakening in institutional form.

Perhaps the debate, then, is misplaced. The question is not whether “My Lord” is colonial, but whether justice itself still commands reverence. In a world increasingly casual about institutions, there is quiet dignity in remembering that some words are not meant to demean — they are meant to elevate. In the "temple of justice" every word, every gesture, and every invocation is an act of devotion — not to power, but to the eternal ideal that justice, like divinity, must inspire awe.

Justice may be human in delivery, but divine in aspiration.