Conference // Panel 3B 

// Panel 3B //
Culture, Crime, Body and Mind

Discussant: Dr Janet Weston // London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine // History and Public Health

Abstracts

Becka Hudson // Birkbeck and University College London // Criminology and Anthropology

Psy Disciplines and Imperial Penal Infrastructure

In recent years, both public and academic attention has turned to the concept of the ‘imperial boomerang’, in which imperial practices return ‘home’ to structure life in the metropole. This has coincided with a renewed interest in the racialising tactics of British penal infrastructure, in both colony and metropole, from scholars across the historical and social sciences. Surprisingly however, such histories have neglected the role of psychiatric practitioners in projects of penal expansion in the British Empire, and in contemporary Britain.

This paper seeks to correct this absence. With a focus on Bengal and Kenya, I demonstrate that British colonial psychiatrists played a pivotal role in shaping racial categories enforced through tactics of policing and imprisonment in British colonies. From here, I argue that this history is instructive for any analysis of the racialising tactics of penal infrastructure in contemporary Britain and, crucially, in understandings of Britain’s continued role in shaping tactics of racialised penal discipline on the world stage. In this way, the paper stretches the 'imperial boomerang’ account of criminal justice to argue both for the centrality of psy professionals and for the ongoing reverberation of said ‘boomerang’, whereby tactics of psychiatrically informed penal management continue to circulate between core and periphery.

Biography

Becka Hudson is a doctoral student at Birkbeck’s Criminology and UCL’s Anthropology departments. Straddling socio-legal studies and psychiatric anthropology, her research is focussed on the relationship of psychiatric diagnosis to prison development in contemporary Britain, and in its former Empire. She has a particular interest in the histories and contemporary applications of psychiatric and risk assessments in penal settings and issues of ‘predictive’ imprisonment such questions throw up. She is a member of the Postgraduate Steering Committee for the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research into Mental Health, a long time campaigner on issues of criminal justice, and regularly appears in popular media to discuss imprisonment.

Nishant Gokhale // University of Cambridge // Legal Studies

“Not Regular Thieves”: Shades of Bhil Engagement with Company Criminal Justice

Hereditary group criminality was a common trope in 19th century India. Thugee--- a secret highway-robbing cult---- was a notable classification which arrested anglophone imaginations through that century. Recent scholarship demonstrates how thugee’s blurry boundaries provided a ready justification for officials in the English East India Company (‘Company’) to deviate from ordinary legal processes and apply exceptional measures.

Despite indigenous Bhils in western and central India being frequently implicated in serious and organised criminal activity ascribed to their lifeways and heredity, they appear to have escaped thugee’s definitional dragnet. Bhil engagement with the Company’s criminal justice system remains insufficiently studied despite the existence of voluminous unpublished archives.

At the cross-roads of imperial and socio-legal history, my research reveals the different paths Bhil engagement with the Company took from thugee. Although Bhils undeniably appear in Company archives as criminals and rebels, they were occasionally employed to combat thuggee. Even as rebels and criminals, Bhils sought to establish a distinctive aesthetic. Further, examining the quotidian archive of criminal law, demonstrates Bhil engagement as witnesses, police, and victims of crime in Company India. This reading furthers understandings of how indigenous peoples received, navigated and shaped imperial law, rather than merely being its victims.

Biography

Nishant Gokhale is a Ph.D. Candidate (Legal Studies) at Cambridge. Nishant obtained his undergraduate degree in law and humanities at NUJS, Kolkata and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and worked for several years in India.

Nishant's research examines the English East India Company's engagement with law at home and in India. His research delves into the Company's project of legal ordering of the indigenous Bhil communities in Khandesh province (western India) in the 19th century. It examines the diverse manifestations of Bhil agency which resulted in the Company reordering itself at local levels and intersects imperial and socio-legal history.

Niyati Shenoy // Colombia University // History

The Missionary's Position: Pursuing Sex Offenders in the British Empire

How did the high imperial British state respond to scandals involving sexual violence in the colonies? In this paper I trace the largely forgotten 1905 case of a British medical missionary, Dr John Sandilands, who was pursued by imperial authorities as a transcontinental fugitive in connection with the rape of several women in Central India between 1901 and 1903. Using judicial and public files from the India Office Records and the National Archives of India, I trace the complex jurisdictional negotiations that led to Sandilands’ eventual capture in Scotland and imprisonment in London—a singular case of the British Empire not only vigorously prosecuting a white citizen for sexual crimes against colonized subjects, but also mobilizing diplomatic channels and metropolitan networks to reach him. I ask: why and how did Dr Sandilands become a scapegoat for an overwhelmingly common, systemic problem, and why were resources expended on his case to the extent they were? Can this early 20th-century manhunt deepen our understanding of economies of publicity and state attention to sexual violence, the evolution of medico-humanitarian standards of personal ethics and conduct, and, to use Rana Jaleel’s phrase, ‘the work of rape’ in an empire over which the sun never set?

Biography

My dissertation explores how changes in the meaning and significance of rape in 19th century India enabled non-state legal actors to frame retributive, retaliatory violence against rapists as a timely and substantive form of justice, and thus to trouble the monopolistic aspirations of colonial state violence. It historically contextualizes the widespread sentiment in contemporary India—in the aftermath of the 2012 rape of Jyoti Singh—that certain rapists should be summarily executed, tortured, or subjected to spectacular forms of public punishment rather than have rights to due process in court. By thinking through the ways in which communities in the ‘Hindi Heartland’ have employed and justified non-state solutions to rape over time, it contributes to the ongoing political and strategic reassessments of India's traditionally state-allied feminist movements, and tries to put Indian movements to end rape into more nuanced conversation with global debates about non-punitive, non-carceral, reparative, and transformative approaches to justice.