BOOK REVIEW: Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee.CRIME AND EMPIRE: THE COLONY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTIONS OF CRIME. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime Caroline Reitz (bio) Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime, by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee; pp. xii + 205. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £51.00, $99.00. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's Crime and Empire is an informative, well-researched addition to the ongoing conversation about the complex relationship between the rhetoric of crime and the construction of British authority in the aftermath of D. A. Miller's Foucauldian study The Novel and the Police (1987). While there is no shortage of participants in this conversation—such as Simon Joyce's Capital Offenses (2003) or, I confess, my own Detecting the Nation (2004)—Mukherjee's text is committed to a particularly historical argument that hopes to return "the possibilities of resistance" to the "so-called 'disciplinary' narratives" (84). As he writes in his conclusion, it feels especially important to do so today, when "fictions of crime remain both enabling and disabling tools of authority" (190). Crime "became a political and cultural preoccupation" (vi) as British society attempted to consolidate its authority at home and abroad at the end of the eighteenth century under the stresses of war, colonial expansion, and urbanization. Traditionally, we have read crime fiction, with its relatively linear structure, investment in closure, and need for good guys and bad guys, as a sort of special agent working to solidify authority and make it legible to the reading public. Mukherjee, however, argues that crime fiction's "relationship with the dominant ideology was much more problematic" (vi) and often exposed the fragility of authority: "at the level of ideology and consensus, narratives of crime, punishment, and justice are double-edged tools that both empower and question authority" (vii). [End Page 713] Mukherjee lays out the central destabilizing paradox by showing how representations of British authority established an essential criminality in the Indian character in order to justify the expansion of British notions of law and order. But there were two problems: first, if Indians were essentially criminal, British attempts at rehabilitation were always already doomed to failure; second, British ideas of law and order were far from straightforward and, in fact, were hotly contested at home. "The necessary illusion of progress, the ideological staple of colonialist aggression," Mukherjee explains, "could no longer be fabricated" (34). Mukherjee carefully positions his argument at the crossroads of Marxist theory and postcolonial theory, seeking to correct some of the poststructuralist indulgences of postcolonial theory without dismissing the very real role of writing and representation in constructing British imperial authority. He takes pains not to base his argument about the instability of authority on the "instabilities of writing and techniques of representation" by "foregrounding the links between the material practices of statecraft and the cultural representations of it" (9). Mukherjee acknowledges that he emphasizes the novel because it was "the most influential cultural product of the period" (vi). But this is a little misleading. Crime and Empire is far more interesting in its treatment of nonfiction, such as the key texts about the creation of both the new police and the colonial administration in British India. Of particular interest is his account of the multiple sites of opposition to Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police bill when it was passed in 1829. Such concerns did not go away when policing was developed in India, such as in the contemporaneous creation of the Thug Police headed by Colonel William Sleeman. The same problems with imprisonment, capital punishment, and notions of hereditary criminality that complicated the arguments about discipline at home were exacerbated in the colonial context. While the careful inclusion and juxtaposition of the extra-literary materials is central to the argument, it also contributes to a cumbersome organization, as Mukherjee himself admits: "I will repeatedly, perhaps tiresomely, insist that unless the dimension of British 'domestic' historical and cultural practices of rulership . . . are taken into consideration, and blended with those in the colony, any account of colonialist ideology and representative practices will remain incomplete" (45). This is persuasive, yet in practice the "parallel enquiry into the debate about the 'criminal' in both the domestic and the colonial...