Crime Through Time: Themes in Indian History

190 Pages·2013·96.076 MB·English

by  Saurabh Dube and Anupama Rao

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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
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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
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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.