Postcolonial penality: Liberty and repression in the shadow of independence, India c. 1947

Abstract

This article reports primary archival data on the colonial penal history of British India and its reconfiguration into the postcolonial Indian state. It introduces criminologists to frameworks through which postcolonial scholars have sought to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities of rule across the colonial/postcolonial divide. The article examines the postcolonial life of one example of colonial penal power, known as the criminal tribes policy, under which more than three million Indian subjects of British rule were restricted in their movements, subject to a host of administrative rules and sometimes severe punishments, sequestered in settlements and limited in access to legal redress. It illustrates how at the birth of the postcolonial Indian state, encompassing visions of a liberal, unfettered and free life guaranteed in a new Constitution and charter of Fundamental Rights, freedom for some was to prove as elusive as citizens as it had been as subjects.

Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology

“…Similarly, Northern Ireland, colonial conflict and British imperialism are all effectively erased from the dominant story of British penal developments in the 20th-century. 4 The idea of a punitive transformation within this small network of regions would become all the more complicated if we include the post-colonial Anglophone sites such as the Caribbean, Singapore, India or Hong Kong, for example (Brown, 2017; Carrington et al., 2016; Fonseca 2018b; Lee and Laidler, 2013; Paton, 2004), or examined the differences of the punitive turn in South as well as North America (Sozzo, 2018). If we were to broaden the scope from prison to punishment we see the abolition and/or abeyance of Magdalene Laundries, industrial schools, Jim Crow, colonialism, slavery and the death penalty in Anglophone world problematises the notion that there has been a dramatic shift from social tolerance to popular punitiveness (Alexander, 2010; Garland, 2010; O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007).…”

“An Unqualified Human Good”? On Rule of Law, Globalization, and Imperialism

“…At its head was the Punjab Chief Court, which was by no means a simple extension of government authority. Shortly after establishment in 1866, for example, it gave notice of its independence by striking down as unlawful the administrative detention of so-called criminal tribes on the basis of the sanctity of "natives'" liberty rights against arbitrary intrusion (Brown 2014). Beneath the Chief Court was a system of six classes of formal courts in which civil and criminal claims and disputes were heard, and in which the putative problem of excessive litigation continually vexed administrators and tested the capacity of court lists.…”

“…This would usefully sharpen the focus on legal transformation. It would also direct attention to the success or failure of new citizens in constraining elite power and securing liberty rights in the postcolony (Brown 2016).…”

Crime, Criminal Justice, and the Evolving Science of Criminology in South Asia

“…The criminal tribes legislation was never brought within the ordinary criminal law of colonial India. The belief that there existed a section of society that must be dealt with outside the ordinary law endured into the postcolonial era in India, albeit with some small refinement of terminology (Brown, 2016). Second, as early repressive efforts gave way to more reformatory thinking, the criminal tribes settlements created the context within which something like a modern social-work approach to crime could begin to emerge (see below).…”