The Birth of Criminology in Colonial South Asia: 1765–1947

Abstract

This chapter explores the nature and development of colonial criminology in British India. It analyzes a series of moments during which this nascent criminology of the subcontinent was given shape and form, including eighteenth century responses to dacoit gangs, the emergence of criminal classification in the early nineteenth century, shortly followed by demands to respond to the so-called Thuggee phenomenon, the development of new thinking about criminal tribes in the middle of the nineteenth century and the arrival of Western criminology in the early part of the twentieth century. In fact, for most of the colonial period and across a swathe of territory ranging from Peshawar in the west to Rangoon in the east the crimes committed by India’s native inhabitants were, for the most part, considered run of the mill, ordinary and not inordinately different from those generated by rural poverty in Britain. So it was toward these “extraordinary” or “abhorrent” criminal types, such as the Thugs who would waylay and then strangle wealthy wayfarers on the roads of central India, that most attention and real thinking was directed. British colonial criminology in South Asia, therefore, was no simple import of Western ideas to the Asian setting. Instead, it was a distinct discourse in its own right. It gained shape slowly over time and place; it responded to problems of governance in India of different types; it was authored and practiced by diverse actors; and its elements were fashioned in various institutional contexts. As a consequence, it was never a “thing” in the sense of it having an essence and body. It was rather more a game in motion, a way of thinking and doing and being, at a certain moment, perpetually in process of development.