Paper short abstract:

This paper will argue that the process of forming British colonial governance and ruler–subject relations in Eastern Bengal was contextual, negotiated, and diverse. It introduces the concept “fiscal subject”.

Paper long abstract:

The process of forming British colonial governance and ruler-subject relations in Eastern Bengal was contextual, negotiated, and diverse.

The Mughal diwani of Bengal (1765) granted the British East India Company access to revenue resources over territories larger than the British Isles. However, collecting revenues depended on participation in complex socio-economic webs, resting on norms of personal relations between sovereign and subject. These were the Achilles' heel of the EIC. It not only lacked attachments to subjects, it also lacked the status and identities that would have made such attachments possible. We may usefully see the Company's revenue surveys as a search for subjects capable of claiming and justifying specific rights under EIC governance. These could only be established by meeting people and assessing the validity of their claims.

The fiscal relations of landed property were by far the most extensive and institutionalized of the Company's relations to subjects. As such, it gave subjects only limited rights in the emerging polity. We may think of them as "fiscal subjects".

But the EIC was an early-modern corporation of merchants; not a state. Driven by commercial interests and accountable to shareholders, the extensive revenue surveys in the 1790s became a bureaucratic quick-fix which the Company came to regret. The consequences proved disastrous. Universal land classifications clashed with environmental realities in a monsoon climate and, until the 1830s, the Company was forced to acknowledge Mughal privileges in land since they could not stand up against the socio-economic tenacity of the former polity.

Paper short abstract:

British legal practice in colonial India was underwritten by a paranoid sensibility, rooted in the gap between the abstract language of the law and the commitments of everyday India life. This paper explores that sensibility through arguments in the Allahabad High Court in the 1880s.

Paper long abstract:

The creation of new legal institutions in colonial India was driven by the British search for coherent ways of making decisions at the expense of their relationship with the everyday lives of Indians. The abstract language of colonial law was produced through the effort by the British to govern India from a distance, and avoid being pulled into relationships and commitments which would have annihilated their sense of self and separateness. But abstraction didn't give the British certainty about the basis upon which they were deciding. The result was that law was administered in a paranoid sensibility, which made it impossible for British judges to trust Indians who had unknown and, from their perspective, partial biases and commitments. This paper shows that sensibility at work within a series of arguments between British and Indian lawyers and judges in the Allahabad High Court during the 1880s. Because of their abstract language, legal institutions seemed to offer a space where Indian legal officers could operate on an equal footing with their British colleagues. But, the suspicious, paranoid sensibility of colonial law meant the involvement of Indians was perceived as a challenge to British authority. The paper concludes by suggesting that an approach which pays attention to the sensibility as well as language of colonial practice allows us to see that Indianisation of the legal profession was a far more radical moment of decolonisation than historians have hitherto imagined.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore the challenge posed by the anticolonial movement in India to the discourse and practice of international law in the Indian National Army trial in 1945.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore the challenge posed by the anticolonial movement in India to the discourse and practice of international law in the Indian National Army trial in 1945. Occurring at the end of the Second World War, two months after the start of the Nuremberg trials and six months before the Tokyo trials, the Indian National Army trial, in which three officers of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army were tried on charges of treason for waging an anticolonial war against British imperial government in India, was one of the most significant events in the domain of international law in the twentieth century. In the course of the long history of colonialism, the discourse of international law had come to be anchored in the idea and institution of empire. I contend that Indian lawyers defending the accused in this trial used it as an occasion to make a claim for a sovereign Indian nation state by repudiating the Empire's claim to be the sole ground of the discourse of international law. Challenging the dominant narrative of the expansion of international law to the colonized world as an imperial gesture of sovereignty and benevolence, this paper examines the role of anticolonial movements in contesting the universalist claims of international law and empire.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon ethnographic work in Sonagachhi, this paper explores how the colonial and the postcolonial legal practices around prostitution/sex work resonate in terms of creating and recreating the women’s identity at the intersection of law and medicine and the resistance such practices evoke.

Paper long abstract:

One can trace the emergence of the prostitute as a medico-legal subject category since the mid- to late nineteenth century during the British colonial rule in India. The Contagious Diseases Acts medically isolated and legally marked women to particularly serve the British soldiers. In the postcolonial phase, with the advent of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the state has renewed its medical surveillance in the red light districts through intervention programs to prevent the spread of the disease. An uncanny continuity between the two historical periods is palpable.

Interestingly, in the midst of the postcolonial state recreating the prostitute as a new subject of rule through medico-legal supervision, what has emerged in response, is a sex workers' movement in Sonagachhi. The movement, which is primarily led by Durbar Mahila Samanawaya Samiti, a grassroots collective, aims to separate "prostitution" from trafficking since they are historically collated under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act. The goal of the movement is to replace the stigmatized label of "prostitution" with the empowerment of "sex work" with a view to establish labor rights.

Drawing upon current ethnographic work in Sonagachhi, this paper highlights two issues: first, how the colonial and the postcolonial legal practices resonate in terms of creating and recreating the women's bodily identity at the intersection of law and medicine. Second, how the current sex-work discourse lays claim to a new legal citizen-labor category. Together, these issues indicate state and citizen/subject formation in the postcolonial phase through claim making that emerges from the social margins.

Paper short abstract:

The 'Rangila Rasul' Case was a significant moment in the life of blasphemy laws in India. It not only initiated a debate about the validity of the existing laws but led to the insertion of section 295(A) that changed the discourse on freedom of speech and expression in India.

Paper long abstract:

The 'Rangila Rasul' and the 'Sair-i-Dozak' cases of 1927 forced a rethinking on the existing blasphemy laws by exposing its limitations and initiating a debate about the need for a separate law to control scurrilous religious writings. It resulted in the addition of section 295 (A) in the IPC. On the one hand these cases exposed the vulnerability of the colonial state to deal with such issues, and on the other hand, the uncertainty of legal system was visible, wherein, under the same law and similar kind of cases, two different accused were given two different verdicts. It showed how the same law could be interpreted in varying ways in the interest of the state, thereby contradicting what Macaulay had claimed to achieve through IPC- "certainty" in order to avoid the judiciary's role in inserting its own sense in the law.

In this article I would like to make three inter-related points. Firstly, the spatiality and temporality of such cases was very significant and the kind of publicization and polarization it experienced was only possible in the post-Khilafat, post-Non-cooperation phase of Punjab politics. Secondly, the manipulative role of the colonial state in order to carve legitimacy was explicit in these cases; and thirdly, the philosophical and political debates that took shape around the issue made it evident that the future of freedom of speech and expression in India would be balanced with caveats, thereby introducing a new language of "liberty" loaded with the concern for social cohesion and communal harmony.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the framing of tenancy legislations and their consequences among the adivasis in the two government estates of Kolhan and Santal Parganas in Chotanagpur under colonial rule.

Paper long abstract:

The chief determinants of agrarian policy in British India were the need for large revenues to support the colonial state apparatus and also the need to gain stability and acquire legitimacy. One of the main instruments of control that they employed over the adivasis of Chotanagpur was the systematic collection of rents through the agency of the village leadership. This paper traces different phases in this transition from 'tribes' to tenants in two government estates in Chotanagpur, Kolhan and the Santal Parganas. In the final phase, imperial ideology at the upper echelons of power reintroduced the category of 'tribe' as a distinct constituent of the empire, which the 'enlightened' colonizers had to protect and govern. Consequently, British agrarian policy came to contain an inner ambiguity where adivasis were referred to as a 'tribe' of the empire, and as 'tenants' of a government estate. The paper also explores the dichotomy between the official policy which identified Chotanagpur as a 'non regulation' area on the one hand, and the need to devise a broad and collective legislation that was not limited within a locality, on the other. Finally, it traces the process whereby tenancy legislation led to the freezing of specific zones as the exclusive domains of particular communities.

Paper short abstract:

Citizenship in India is often mediated by governance processes, structuring resource contests, along caste and tribal lines; and, sited at panchayats. ‘Governmentality of panchayati raj’ disciplines all actors, including Naxals, which will be analysed using field data from Bihar and Jharkhand.

Paper long abstract:

The practice of citizenship in marginalised parts of India has been subject to a 'judicious veto' of the administrative apparatus ever since the colonial times, the formal legal rights notwithstanding. The governance processes thereby attain salience in understanding the complex and multifarious conflicts generated in these parts, which include a variety of contestations around caste and tribe; resource control (both public and societal); and, rationalities of governance. Some of these processes also correlate with the violent contestations labelled Naxalism, sparking off a new kind of political economy wherein the challenge to the liberal state from violent non-state actors (clubbed together under the label of Naxals) seem to be subject to the disciplining power of the same governmental process that lie at the roots of these issues.

Public policy geared towards addressing these conflicts is premised on mutually competing rationalities of raison d'état on the one hand and socio-economic transformation on the other. Additionally, the engagement between governance processes and conflict is mediated by the new governmentality of panchayati raj, which in turn become the institutional location of contests between all these processes and are in turn both, open to capture as well as emancipatory politics of citizenship. This complex melange of factors promise to generate a politics of transformation in Bihar and Jharkhand, which is the analytical focus of this paper.

Drawing from a recent intensive field study in Bihar and Jharkhand, the paper will analyse the implication of the above-mentioned processes for politics, governance processes and citizens' rights.

Paper short abstract:

We will look here at the bits and pieces of existing law, at judiciary precedent and at the various attempts to design a refugee law, in order to understand better how India treats one specific category of non-citizens – refugees.

Paper long abstract:

This proposed paper offers to reflect on the making of citizenship in India by examining the way one specific category of non-citizens is treated, namely, refugees. India, which is host to a variety of refugees, takes an ambiguous stance vis-à-vis the refugee issue. It presents itself, and is also usually recognized as, a welcoming host country, but refugees there are not granted the same legal protection as refugees in most other countries. This comes from India's refusal to adhere to the international refugee system: it has signed neither the 1951 Geneva Convention nor the 1967 Additional Protocol and is therefore not a member of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It also comes from India's decision not to adopt a domestic refugee law, which means that, from a legal standpoint, refugees in India are no different from any other foreigners.

In fact, the existing legal framework for dealing with refugees in India is made up of bits and pieces, which law practitioners use to provide adequate protection to refugees. It has often been pointed out that judges have been quite efficient at creatively interpreting the existing law in order to provide refugees with the maximum protection possible. We will look here at the bits and pieces of existing law, at judiciary precedent and at the various attempts to design a refugee law, in order to understand better how India distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens.