Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti Lucky Issar (bio) Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti; pp. 302. Cambridge UP, 2021. $114.95 cloth. Indian resentment toward British colonial rule began to manifest in India in the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably with the 1857 mutiny by Indian soldiers, which spread across northern India. Following the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in 1919 in which British soldiers fired on peaceful protesters, killing more than one thousand people including women and children, most Indians of all persuasions became fiercely [End Page 136] opposed to British rule. The poet Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood in protest. Anyone who questioned British rule was imprisoned on flimsy charges. However, there was not a time when Indian people did not in some form resist the British presence in India, and there was not a time when the British, especially as they became stronger, did not use anti-Indian narratives as well as military and legal means to strengthen their position, a strategy central to the colonial policies that Leila Neti examines in Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination. Examining three important legal cases that came before the highest court in colonial India along with the works of prominent Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Philip Meadows Taylor, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Neti's book focuses on how British laws and literary narratives worked in tandem to produce Indian subjects who were incapable of governing themselves, thus justifying continued British rule in India. The discourse on "thuggee" or "thugs" played a key role in enacting strict laws. The presence of thugs was not wholly a British fantasy, but the British exaggerated their numbers. Reading nineteenth-century literature and court cases, Neti demonstrates the tremendous energy the British put into creating the figure of the thug, essentially conflating it with all Indians. Not only did they use anti-thuggee laws to implement force against all those who acted against their interests; the British also convinced themselves of their superiority by constituting the inferior Indian, which legitimized their presence and gave them a reason to criminalize subcultures they did not understand. In addition to negative literary representations of Indians, the legal opinions of British lawmakers not only revealed what they thought about Indians but also exposed "their ability to reach back in time and reframe 'tradition' in order to influence how Indians would come to think of themselves" (20). The British also propagated the notion that thugs were motivated by biological reasons rather than political ones, a claim central to British popular and legal representations. In court proceedings, while the British courts claimed to be fair toward all, they handled Indian and British subjects differently. Moreover, at the same time that prison reforms were recommended in England, new harsher laws were introduced in India. Neti points out that this tendency of disparate treatment was also evident in literature. When dealing with English criminals, British authors narrated them in a way that ultimately rehabilitated them in society, whereas the treatment given to Indian criminals further augmented the nature of their criminality, emphasizing their inability to reform themselves, thus reinforcing the idea that Indians were not only incapable of governing themselves but were also innately corrupt. An important aspect of the book is its examination of nineteenth-century novels and legal cases to reveal how law and literary narratives emerged to produce knowledge that damaged Indians while strengthening colonial rule. [End Page 137] Through a major focus on Begum Sumroo, the ruler of Sardhana principality, and the case of her grandson, David Dyse, the book exposes British duplicity, but it also shows, by default, that British legal systems were not entirely to be summarily dismissed. The British authorities could have confiscated Begum Sumroo's properties, yet they were following legal procedures and were not completely fraudulent. Much later, Dyse too encountered property-related issues with the British. The court in English declared him insane, and although he later obtained a certificate in France attesting his sanity, the British court did not overturn its ruling. The British handling seemed dubious, but it could also be that...