Challenging the Rule(s) of Law : Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India

Contents: Acknowledgements. Introduction by Kalpana Kannabiran and Ranbir Singh. I. The construction of crime and criminality: 1. Laws of metamorphosis: from Nomad to offender/Meena Radhakrishna. 2. Victims and Villains: the construction of female criminality in colonial Calcutta/Sumanta Banerjee. 3. That despicable specimen of humanity: policing of homosexuality in India/Arvind Narrain. 4. Sexual assault and the law/Kalpana Kannabiran. II. Vulnerability, governance and the law: 5. Social exclusion and criminal law/S.R. Sankaran. 6. Building a subaltern women's perspective/Jayshree P. Mangubhai and Aloysius Irudayam S.J. 7. Whose life is it anyway?: Adivasi communities and entitlements to life/Seema Misra. 8. Preserving wellness and personhood: a psychosocial approach to the Child/Shekhar P. Seshadri and Kaveri I. Haritas. III. Legislating the other and the extraordinaire: 9. Penal strategies and political resistance in colonial and independent India/Ujjwal Kumar Singh. 10. Communities, gender and the border: a legal narrative on India's North East/Paula Banerjee. 11. Parens Patriae: exercising patriarchal prerogative in post-partition India/Ritu Menon. IV. Social ordering of the 'Legal': 12. Law and life in the state of nature: archiving stories from legal literacy/Abha Singhal Joshi. 13. Revisiting impunity and criminality: of corruption, collusion, consequences and victims/Vijay K. Nagaraj. 14. Khap Panchayats in Haryana: sites of legal pluralism/K.S. Sangwan. V. Human rights and criminal jurisprudence: 15. Crimes, passion and detachment: colonial foundations of rule of law/Ranabir Samaddar. 16. Conspiracies of association: associational offences, associational freedoms and the rule of law/K.G. Kannabiran. 17. Of strong medicine and weak stomachs: the resort to enhanced punishment in criminal law in India/Bikram Jeet Batra. 18. The contexts of criminology: a brief restatement/Kalpana Kannabiran. Index.

"This rare comprehensive critique of criminology in India brings together widely respected activists, advocates, bureaucrats, scholars and practitioners who share their concerns about the Indian criminal justice system through an interdisciplinary lens and discuss the need to entrench human rights in Indian polity. It is a significant step towards mapping the ways in which interdisciplinary research and human rights activism might inform legal praxis more effectively and holistically.

Challenging the Rule(s) of Law: Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India contests unproblematic assumptions of the rule of law and opens out avenues for renewed and radical study of criminal law in the country. The collection looks at criminal law from the early colonial period to the present, examining the problem of overt violence by state actors and their compliance with dominant private actors. It calls into question the denial by the state of the wherewithal for bare life, which compounds people's vulnerability to a repressive rule of law.

This work is a must read for students, researchers and faculty of law, criminal law, criminology, legal history, human rights, sociology of law, political science, anthropology, social exclusion studies and colonial history. It will also be invaluable for law historians, legal scholars and policy makers, especially the judiciary." (jacket)