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Crime Through Time: Themes in Indian History PDF

190 Pages·2013·96.076 MB·English
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' . Ais CU! QUK 003: 0 = 213A 8948 Uni Gdttingen i1)77 344 Crime through Time Oxford in India Readings Crime through Time Themes in Indian History Available in the Series Kaushik Roy (ed.) War and Society in Colonial India (OIP) Ishita Banerjee-Dube (ed.) Caste in History (OIP) Edited by Aloka Parasher-Sen (ed.) Subordinate and Marginal Groups in SAURABH DUBE AND ANUPAMA RAO Early India (Second Edition, OIP) S. Irfan Habib and Social History of Science in Colonial India Dhruv Raina (eds) Mushirul Hasan (ed.) India’s Partition: Process, Strategy, and Mobilization (OIP)* David Ludden (ed.) Agricultural Production and South Asian History (OIP)* PJ. Marshall (ed.) The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (OIP)* Michael H. Fisher (ed.) The Politics of the British Annexation of India 1757-1857 (OIP)* Muzaffar Alam and The Mughal State 1526-1750 (OIP)* Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds) Richard M. Eaton (ed.) India’s Islamic Traditions, 711-1750 (OIP)* Jos J.L. Gommans and Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia Dirk H.A. Kolff (eds) 1000-1800 (OIP)* Ian J. Kerr (ed.) Railways in Modern India (OIP)* Ranabir Chakravarti (ed.) Trade in Early India (OIP)* * These and some earlier titles in this series were commissioned by an editorial board comprising C.A. Bayly, Neeladri Bhattacharya, and Basudev OXFORD Chatterji. UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries For Published in India by Leela Dube (1923-2012) Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, 1, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India Feminist and Anthropologist Extraordinaire © Oxford University Press 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First published in 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN-13: 978-0-19-807761-9 ISBN-10: 0-19-807761-0 Typeset in 10.5/13.4 Minion Pro by Excellent Laser Typesetters, Pitampura, Delhi 110 034 Printed in India at Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020 Contents Series Note Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Questions of Crime: An Introduction Anupama Rao and Saurabh Dube PARTI. PRECOLONIAL PREMONITIONS 1. Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country Sumit Guha 2. Bandit as King 20 Malavika Kasturi ParT II. COLONIAL CONCERNS 3. Issues of Islamic Jurisprudence 51 Scott Alan Kugle 4. Criminal Communities 58 Radhika Singha 5. Development of Discipline 80 Sanjay Nigam Mee oe le” _ OO P Viii Contents Part III. SURVEILLANCE AND SUBVERSION Police and Public Order 101 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar Disciplining ‘Natives’ 106 Anand A. Yang Series Note The Self and the Cell 13] David Arnold PaRTIV. LEGALITIES AND ILLEGALITIES Distress and Defiance 161 Ranajit Guha The series focuses on important themes in Indian history, on those 10. The Infanticidal Woman 166 which have long been subject of interest and debate, or which have Padma Anagol acquired importance more recently. . DL) Telling Tales Each volume in the series consists of, first, a detailed Introduction; 18] Saurabh Dube second, a careful choice of the essays and book-extracts vital to a proper understanding of the theme; and, finally, an Annotated Bibliography. PART V. PosTCOLONIAL PREDILECTIONS Using this consistent format, each volume seeks as a whole to cite 12; Outlaw Woman cally assess the state of the art on its theme, chart the historiographi- 209 cal shifts that have occurred since the theme emerged, rethink old Rajeswari Sunder Rajan problems, open up questions which were considered closed, locate the 3. Death of a Kotwal 235 theme within wider historiographical debates, and pose new issues of Anupama Rao inquiry by which further work may be made possible. 14. Semiotics of Terror 260 Tanika Sarkar Annotated Bibliography 276 About the Contributors 308 Preface Not so long ago, as we planned Crime through Time, our minds moved not to the past but to the present, to literature rather than history. We were struck by the manner in which Aravind Adiga’s recent, prize- winning novel, The White Tiger, posed provocative questions about crime as the practice of social critique. This was reminiscent of our own conversations about the centrality of law, violence, and the state to projects of collective action and self-making. Put simply, in Adiga’s work, we found an exploration of the violence of caste hatred and class hostility in globalizing India, and of the reproduction of privi- lege through the distinct, if related, registers of ‘feudal’ and ‘modern’ modes of power in these terrains. Such concerns resonate powerfully with our own attempts to understand crime and criminality as his- torical constructions. Produced within the interstices of state-society relations and governed by shifting ideas about normative conduct and legitimate punishment, these constructions ever entail pasts that continue into the present. Now, the focal concern of Adiga’s literary ethnographic gaze is the contemporary violence of everyday life, alongside the amorality of India’s emergent middle classes, more generally. With their crude penchant for conspicuous consumption, here are social groups that continue to rely on a large service class of domestic workers—drivers, ayahs, chaukidars—whose labour sustains them. Rather more than their ownership of the latest dishwashers and plasma TVs, what is distinctive about this globalizing elite is their power over living labour, C—O . xiil Preface xii Preface Unsurprisingly, even the globally popular Slumdog Millionaire, the latter often relegated to servants’ quarters, forced to register with a sort of morality play where the underdog gets the money and the the police, issued passes to enter gated-communities, routinely under- girl, insistently poses questions of social relations between the elite paid, and frequently corporeally-disciplined. and the subaltern. Unlike earlier models of collective rebellion or It follows that even as cultural forms of hierarchical subordination class struggle, however, the problem of social intimacy is now seen are increasingly redefined and legitimized as salaried work, what is to involve escalating levels of everyday violence in urban South Asia, noteworthy is the fear among the middle-classes of subaltern vio- provoked by the potent combination of growing economic disparity lence provoked by disparities of wealth. This fear coexists with the and the democratization of consumer desire. And s0, too, from every- middle-classes’ (necessarily unmet, ever deferred) aspirations sus- day discussions of the endless scams today—involving politicians, tained by seductions of endless consumer goods and the good life. bureaucrats, corporates, and powerbrokers—through to the politics At the same time, the mutual hostility between domestic workers and both of India Incorporated and Team Anna (Hazare), contemporary their employers incites a range of behaviors on the part of the former, representations of criminality gesture to an unstable social order from petty thievery to class violence. predicated on the permeability of (state) law and (popular) violence. Recall that in the novel, Balram Halwai, an intimate witness to his In one or another way, crime is on every Indian mind today. master’s ethical degeneration, engages in turn in an act of ‘purifying To point to the topicality of a theme, however, is not to overlook violence’. Balram kills his master. This fight-unto-death between that putting together a volume of essays on so broad a topic as crime master and servant is also a struggle for social recognition. Here, and its relation to pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial legalities is Adiga suggests that the servant's brutalization is produced by, and a perilous task. The selections are unavoidably limited, and must omit equally enables, the further brutalization of society. At the same time, a great deal of important work. Our constraints have been those of rather than remake the social order through revolutionary violence, space as well as those of securing permissions for texts to be included the fixer, the trickster, and the scamster of urban India now stands in in the volume. We seek the understanding of authors whose work the place of the state, including especially the latter’s monopoly over we have been unable to include in this volume. It is our hope that, legitimate violence. together with other readers, they will find that Crime through Time Adiga’s dystopic vision replicates broader trends in Indian popular works toward disclosing certain key dynamics regarding the changing and political cultures today, which turn on the mimetic interchange place of crime in the socio-political order, rather than making total- between law and violence. For example, such mutual begetting of izing claims to represent a field so complex and generously explored the licit and the illicit significantly structures popular films about as law, crime, and the state on the subcontinent. Bombay's underworld, which were inaugurated by Ram Gopal Verma’s Anupama would like to thank Riyad Koya for his comments and Satya, and that now inform sub-metro variants of underworlds suggestions. She is grateful to the directors of the Centre for Modern such as Omkara. And so, too, the symmetries and asymmetries of Indian Studies (Goettingen), Ravi Ahuja and Rupa Viswanath, as well order and excess produced within the blockbuster Rang de Basanti as to Srirupa Roy and Peter van der Veer for helping to create the are incorporated into the more indie No One Killed Jessica, each intellectually salubrious environment in which this volume was com- as cinema and reality. The point is that even as the Indian state pleted. retreats from its earlier commitments to social welfare and collective Saurabh would like to thank Arvind and Anu for the endless hours enfranchisement, violence, instead of pedagogical transformation, of fun, mirth, and hospitality in their lovely Manhattan apartment, appears to be the mode of political communication between social all of which went into the planning of this volume during the last two classes, while the middle-classes oppose the state through their innate (of many) stays there. entitlements. ee xiV Preface Both of us wish to thank Francisco Figueroa Medina for all his help, from scanning proofs to correcting references, and especially for put- ting together the bibliography. We also acknowledge the efforts of the editorial department of Oxford University Press, New Delhi, as well as the help and patience of the contributors to Crime through Time. We Acknowledgements are deeply grateful to Sudhir Patwardhan for graciously and gener- ously allowing us to use his oil-on-canvas, The Fall, for the cover. At the end, Anu proposed and worded the dedication of this vol- ume to Leela Dube, and Saurabh concurred. December 2012 ANUPAMA Rao, New York SAURABH DuBE, Mexico City The editors and the publisher would like to thank the following for permission to include these articles in the volume: Cambridge University Press for excerpts from Scott Kugle, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 257-313, and for excerpts from Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and State in India, 1850- 1950, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd. for excerpts from ‘Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth’, Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871-1900", The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 27, no. 3, 1990, pp. 257-87, New Delhi/Newbury Park/London, Sage. Taylor and Francis, and South Asia for Anand Yang ‘Disciplining Natives”: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth Century India’, vol. X, no. 2, December 1987, pp. 29-45. Permanent Black for David Arnold, “The Self and the Cell: Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories in Telling Lives in India: Biography, reply and Life History, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 93. : History Workshop Journal for ‘The Emergence of the Female Criminal i n Indiaf:as InfTasnfatniiscnsi de and Survival under the Raj,’ seHei story Workshop Journal, Spring, vol. 53, 2002, pp. 73-93.

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