A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India.

• Author: Rocher, Lucho
• Position: Reviews of Books

A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. By RADHIKA SINGHA. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xxix + 342. $32.

On 14 October 1837, Thomas Babington Macaulay and the Indian Law Commissioners addressed a letter to the Governor-General, Lord Auckland: "Your Lordship will perceive that the system of penal law we propose is not a digest of any existing system, and that no existing System has furnished us even with a groundwork" (pp. 297-98 n. 53). Macaulay's Draft Penal Code of 1837, presented as based solely on universal principles of jurisprudence, was not readily accepted: "[b]ecause of the lack of political will or incentive to adopt the code, it was consigned to various phases of reassessment" (p. 292). The Indian Penal Code finally received the assent of Governor-General Lord Canning twenty-three years later, after the 1857 uprising, on 6 October, 1860.

Radhika Singha's book, a thoroughly rewritten version of her 1990 doctoral dissertation done under the supervision of Chris Bayly, deals with crime and justice in the period preceding--"leading up to" would be only partly accurate--the 1837 Draft Penal Code, starting from the judicial reforms of 1772 in Bengal. From a social historian's perspective--Singha explicitly distinguishes her own approach from that of the legal scholar, Jorg Fisch (Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law 1769-1817 [Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983])--this period of sixty-five years is fascinating: it shows how the British, with their own, not always unanimous or even unilinear, ideas about crime and punishment, struggled to come to grips with an indigenous penal system characterized by "its variation from one Presidency to another, imprecision, and the inconvenience of working through references to Islamic law" (p. vii).

The book is crammed with information, based on extensive reading not only of printed books, articles, acts, regulations, minutes, correspondence, etc., but also of handwritten materials in records preserved in British and Indian depositories. It deals with homicide, slavery, female infanticide, sati, "thuggee" and dacoity, and other activities that involved the right to punish and the kind of punishment to be applied.

Of special interest to this reviewer--and, presumably, to most readers of our journal--is a theme that dominates the entire period and that is raised repeatedly in the volume. On the one hand, "[t]he criminal...