Criminal Imaginaries and Legal Order

Syllabus with List of Readings

Module 1:

Topics to be Covered:

This module will study topics like the Thuggs/ Thugee and the Criminal Tribes in colonial and postcolonial India in detail.

Week 1

Thuggs/ Thuggee

[During this week we will discuss the case study of Thuggs that saw the founding of a specific department, the Thugee Department. It will discuss, how a ‘dreadful’ criminality was crafted by the British colonialists in India and how such criminality created the foundations of a system that could bypass rules.]

 An introductory orientation lecture will be held to theoretically and conceptually locate the discussions that will take place during the course.

Radhika Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, 1 (1993).

Kim Wagner, ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers: A Reassessment of Thuggee’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, issue 4, 2004, pp 931-963

Week 2

Criminal Tribes- Eugenics & Crime

[This week will extend the discussion from Thugee to the next level by discussing how crime in British colonial India came to be seen as located in the genetic make-up of various tribes. It will also discuss how colonialists used certain governmental techniques such as settlements and reformation programmes to regulate such tribes.]

Andrew J. Major, State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of Dangerous Classes, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 33, 3, 1999.

Mark Brown, ‘Ethnology and Colonial Administration in Nineteenth century British India: The question of Native Crime and Criminality’, The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol.36, No.2, 2003, pp 201-219.

Module 2:

Criminalising Individuals

Topics to be Covered:

This module will look at specific problem categories of individuals such as habitual offender, Goonda, Rowdy Sheeter, Vagrant, Prostitute etc., which have been perceived as a threat to the maintenance of law and order.

Week 3

Mutineers- Crushing rebellion & the British War on Terror.

David Baker, ‘Colonial Beginnings and the Indian Response: The Revolt of 1857-58 in Madhya Pradesh’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 25, Issue 3, July 1991, pp 511-543.

Tapti Roy, ‘Visions of the Rebels: A study of 1857 in Bundelkhand’, Modern Asian Studies, Volume 27, Issue 1, 1993, pp 205-228.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘“Statan Let Loose Upon Earth”: The Kanpur Massacre in India in the Revolt of 1857’, Past & Present, No.128, 1990, pp 92-116

Week 4

Insurgents & Ghadrites

Kim Wagner, “Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency”, History Workshop Journal (Jan 2018).

Bhavani Raman, “Law in Times of Counterinsurgency” (Chapter 4) in, Aparna Balachandran et al., Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India, OUP, 2017.

Week 5

Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, (Chapter 11) in, Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton University Press, 1993, Pages 640

Ananda Bhattacharya, ‘Reconsidering the Sanyasi Rebellion’, Social Scientist, Vol.40, No.3/ 4, March-April 2012, pp 81-100.

Week 6

Understanding Colonial Violence: Some Issues

Jonathan Saha, ‘Histories of Everyday Violence in British India’, History Compass, 9/11, 2011, pp 844-853.

Anupama Rao, ‘Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India’, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 2001, pp 186-205.

Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, Vol. 120, Issue 4, 2015, pp 1218-1246.

Week 7

Taylor Sherman, ‘Jallianwala Bagh, the Punjab disturbances of 1919, and the limits of state power in India, 1919-20’ (Chapter 2), in State Violence and Punishment in India, Sage, 2010, pp 14-37.

Kim Wagner, ‘‘Calculated to Strike Terror’: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past & Present, No. 233, 2016, pp 185-225.

Week 8

Vagrant/Iterant

[This week will discuss unproductive subjects of the empire, both Indian and European, who created embarrassment as well as administrative challenges to the colonial governance.]

Aravind Ganchari, ‘‘White Man’s Embarrassment’ European Vagrancy in 19^th century Bombay’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 25, 2002, pp 2477-2486

David Arnold, ‘Poor Europeans in India, 1750-1947’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 20, no. 2, June 1979, pp 454-455

Neeladri, B. ‘Predicaments of Mobility: Peddlers and Itinerants in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern India’, in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950, Delhi, 2003.

Week 9

Prostitution and Colonial Governance

[This week will discuss the significant issue of sex and governance in colonial India. It will discuss how prostitutes were seen as ‘immoral’ yet had a peculiar utility when it came to providing leisure to the soldiers of the British Empire. Such sexual conduct often posed health risks too.]

Phillipa Levine, Orientalist sociology and the creation of colonial sexualities, Feminist Review, No.65, pp 5-21

Stephen Legg, Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923), Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 46, No.6, pp 1459-1505

Ann L. Stoler, Making Empire Respectable, The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20^th century Colonial Cultures, American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, No.4, 1989, pp634-660

Week 10

Goondas and Habitual Offenders: Labour & ‘Disorder’

[The figure of the Vagabond is very important when it comes to maintaining quotidian law and order. This week will discuss certain figures such as Goondas, History Sheeters, Habitual Offenders, which enabled late colonial state in India to institute administrative mechanisms for externment of individuals from a city. This week will bring in issues of labour (both formal and informal), communalism and emergent urban governance in colonial India.]

Sugata Nandi, ‘Constructing the Criminal: Politics of Social Imaginary of the “Goonda’, Social Scientist, pp 37-54.

Prashant Kidambi, ‘The Ultimate Masters of the City: Police, Public Order and the Poor in Colonial Bombay, c. 1893-1914’, Crime, History & Socieites, Vol.8, No. 1, 2004, pp 27-47.

Vivek Dharishwar & Shrivatsa, ‘Rowdy-sheeters’: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics, in Subaltern Studies No.9: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Edt. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakravarty, 1996.

Week 11

Outlaw/Bandit, Daaku: The Peasant Challenge

Markus Daechsel, ‘Zalim Daku and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity’, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Vol.13, No.1, 2003, pp 21-43.

Vinita Damodaran, ‘Azad Dastaas and Dacoit Gangs: The Congress and Underground Activity in Bihar, 1942-44’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 26, Issue 3, pp 417-450.

Week 12

Shail Mayaram, ‘Kings Versus Bandits: Anti-Colonialism in a Bandit Narrative,’ Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2003, pp 315-338.

Anand A Yang, ‘Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 66, Issue 4, 2007, pp 881-896.