Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:07:26.126Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Pardons and Scaffolds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2024

Alastair McClure
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong
Get access

Summary

Chapter Six offers a careful reading of the first two sedition trials of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1898 and 1908). While existing scholarship has studied his subversive performances within the courtroom, I extend this analysis to incorporate his efforts at winning executive mercy and commutation from prison. More than any other political leader, Tilak spent his imprisonment exhausting every avenue to petition and appeal against his sentence. This included multiple approaches to the Privy Council and serious plans to petition the House of Lords. In an important and original breakthrough in anticolonial political thought, it was when Tilak failed to win freedom on the basis of justice alone that he connected the availability of mercy to the curtailment of political rights in India.

Type
Chapter
Information
Trials of Sovereignty
Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922
, pp. 185 - 232
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Pardons and Scaffolds
  • Alastair McClure, The University of Hong Kong
  • Book: Trials of Sovereignty
  • Online publication: 20 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009553490.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Pardons and Scaffolds
  • Alastair McClure, The University of Hong Kong
  • Book: Trials of Sovereignty
  • Online publication: 20 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009553490.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Pardons and Scaffolds
  • Alastair McClure, The University of Hong Kong
  • Book: Trials of Sovereignty
  • Online publication: 20 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009553490.006
Available formats
×