The rule of law is conventionally understood to be one of the benefits bestowed by the British Empire upon a chaotic and disorganized Indian society. However, the archival record is full of incidents of Britons murdering, maiming and assaulting Indians ? and getting away with it. This study is based on the premise that white violence was one of the most visible yet closely guarded secrets at the heart of the empire in India.
The administration of justice was a foundational feature of the British colonial state. An ideology of empire, an impartial rule of law distinguished the order of colonial rule from the chaos of pre-colonial rule. An instrument of colonial control, law also had to maintain Britain?s hold on India. The tension between the principle of impartial justice and the imperative of imperial command tended to snap around trials of violent Britons, exposing the fact that the scales of colonial justice were imbalanced by the weight of race.
This study examines the disjuncture between the discourse and practice of law through the prism of white violence. The driving hypothesis of the project is that a codified rule of law was designed by colonial administrators to control both unruly Britons and their colonized Indian subjects. Approaching the legal arena as a site of social and political contestation, the proposed research follows the top-down efforts of colonial officials to establish a uniform rule of law as well as the bottom-up challenges posed by a variety of local actors, including British planters, Indian peasants, and anti-colonial nationalists. Drawing on official records, case law, private papers, personal memoirs and newspaper reports, this interdisciplinary study explores how the rule of law ushered in a new regime of power even as it restrained its own authority by constructing a new terrain of struggle.
