ECSAS 2023 – Turin 26-29 July

36 – Interrogating Deviance and ‘Crime’ in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

While deviance violates social norms, crime violates the formal legal order. Yet both are social constructs based on ethical norms. The proposed panel analyses the construction of deviance by the civil society and the state in South Asia, both in the colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Convenors

Sanjukta Das Gupta - Department of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Peter B. Anderson - Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Amit Prakash - Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Long Abstract

While deviance violates social norms, crime violates the formal legal order. Yet both are social constructs based on ethical norms. The proposed panel analyses the construction of deviance by the civil society and the state in South Asia, both in the colonial and post-colonial contexts. It seeks to trace the processes whereby ‘deviance’ is translated to ‘crime’ and to explore the changing conceptions of crime in different spaces and times. Under the new legal order of the colonial state certain existent socio-economic practices had come to be seen as ‘crime’. Following Independence and decolonization, many such issues acquired new classifications and reinterpretations while others became ‘normalized’. The mechanisms through which such constructs occur offer a window into complex processes of legalization as well as political and social change, implicating a series of actors and institutions. Numerous fault lines may exist (and thus, come to collide) between state-induced ethical order and societal, community or individual ethical ideal.

The proposed panel will examine the institutions, practices and discourses of colonial and post-colonial conceptions of deviance and crime in the context of prevailing notions of justice, order and morality. The panel invites paper proposals across disciplinary boundaries engaging with any aspect of this process across the South Asian subcontinent in colonial and postcolonial times.

Presentations

Still “Criminal” After All These Years: Criminal and Denotified Tribes in Colonial and Postcolonial India
Yang Anand - University of Washington, History, Seattle, United States
Criminalizing ‘Peoples Raj’: Workers’ militancy and deviance in postcolonial India, 1964-65
Wani Javed Iqbal - Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), New Delhi, School of Law, Governance & Citizenship, New Delhi, India
Making of Industrial ‘Peace’ in Post Colonial India
Sharma Megha - Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Social Sciences, Delhi, India
Environment and Development amongst Adivasis as Deviance in Liberal Discourse
Prakash Amit - Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, New Delhi, India
Class, Crime and Fear: The Goondas and Respectable Fears in Colonial Calcutta, 1920-1947
NANDI SUGATA - WEST BENGAL STATE UNIVERSITY, HISTORY, KOLKATA, India
“Unruly”Women,Transgressive Spaces and Social Disorder:Crime and Punishment in Fiction from Northeast India
Moral Dr Rakhee Kalita - Cotton University, English and Women's Studies, GUWAHATI, India
Criminal Lunacy and Colonial Discourse of Deviance and Disorder: The Case of Mappila Rebels of Malabar
Jasmin Shareena Jasmin. P K - MES Kalladi College, Mannarkkad, History, Mannarkkad, India
Land rights and crime: Adivasi women in colonial and post-colonial eastern India
Das Gupta Sanjukta - Department of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
The Not So Noble “Savage”: Unpacking the Co-constitution of Sexual Deviance and Criminality in Colonial India
Bhattacharya Arnav - University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science, Philadelphia, United States
Courts and ‘Najayaz’ clerks: Roles and relations within the formal judicial system of Bihar
Anushka - Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Public Policy and Management, Kolkata, India
Encapsulating Betrayal: Partition (1947)
Avarna Ojha - Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom