| Crimes, Illegality and Law in Colonial India

Taking the Indian Penal Code as the centerpiece, this course covers the formative years of criminal laws in India. Some of the questions raised in this course are: who is a criminal? Was the category of criminal biologically or socially constructed? Did poverty lead to more crimes or were they effects of economic cycles? How were the women and the transgender treated in this emergent phase of criminal law? How was an effective punishment for an offence reached? The criminal laws in India were a product of many conversations, between the metropole and the colony, between different regions of India and between different agents within India. For this reason, this course invokes sociology, legal history, labour studies, gender studies, anthropological studies, forensic studies and literature wherever necessary to understand a specific category. It also explores the nature of investigation of crimes, penal policies, and the problems in policing of crimes. The aim of the course is to people the story of criminal laws and note how this social intervention changes our understanding of laws.