| Age of Crimes : Law, Order and Capital from Colonial to Post Colonial Times

This course offers a conversation between law, order, capital and crime from eighteenth century to contemporary period. The approach is based on a dialectic relationship between modernity and criminality and considers both as mutually constitutive. It will offer a different point of view of law as not merely territorial but also oceanic which diluted claims of sovereignty and power. It will focus on the tensions in law– between being emancipatory and being coercive, between the metropole’s vision of the colony and the limitations of colonial power. This course deliberately goes against the imagination of a colonial governmentality to locate problems in translation of law, limits of colonial governance, agency of the criminal subjects, which made the criminal laws in India at best an ad hoc machine.

Chronologically the course is divided into three parts. Part I focusses on the claims of sovereignty  and jurisprudence by the Company and the imperial government juxtaposed with the limitations of such claims. Part II will shift attention to the politics of implementation of colonial law. It will concentrate on ordering of Indian subjects, making of new criminal offences, and criminal subjects exercising agency to negotiate such legal categories. Part III will centre on the regulation of flows of capital, commodities and people to delineate the ‘legal’ market. It will draw attention to the blind spots in law to show how illegality is created due to the development of new legal categories.

Course Objectives

Through this course, the students will be able to historicize some of the criminal offences and understand the limits of the rule of law. The students will get a sense of how social, political, economic consideration changed the nature of law as a binding category. As many of these criminalities still surface today, the students will be able to understand the changing context of capital and politics in shaping the hand of law.