Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-15T07:35:32.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Rule of Colonial Indifference: Rape on Trial in Early Colonial India, 1805–57

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2010

Elizabeth Kolsky
Get access

Abstract

This article explores the history of intraracial (Indian-on-Indian) rape in early colonial India. Though at times uneven and unpredictable in their rulings, British judges created a set of evidentiary requirements and a body of legal decisions that were as harsh on rape victims as the precolonial Islamic system was presumed to be. Despite the colonial promise of a more modern and humane criminal law, the gradual displacement of Islamic law did little to widen rape victims' path to legal remedy. English common law presumptions about the frequency of false charges and a suspicion of women's claims combined with a colonial insistence on the peculiarity of Indian culture to make it difficult for victims of rape to prevail in court. The colonial legal treatment of the “unsensational” crime of rape was rather unsensational. It largely reflected contemporary trends in England, which raises the important question of what was distinctively colonial about it. 

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 1093 - 1117
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2010

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.)

References

List of References

Anderson, J. N. D. 1966–67a. “Islamic Law and Its Administration in India.” Paper presented at the Contributions to the Study of Indian Law and Society South Asia Seminar, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. N. D.. 1966–67b. “The Nature and Sources of Islamic Law.” Paper presented at the Contributions to the Study of Indian Law and Society South Asia Seminar, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Block, Sharon. 2006. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Burns, Catherine. 2005. Sexual Violence and the Law in Japan. New York: RoutledgeCurzon.Google Scholar
Campbell, George. 1852. Modern India: A Sketch of the System of Civil Government. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Carroll, Lucy. 1989. “Law, Custom and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widow's Remarriage Act of 1856.” In Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work, and the State, ed. Krishnamurthy, J., 1–26. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Anna. 1987. Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845. London: Pandora.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Ann Laura, eds. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelstein, Laurie. 1998. “An Accusation Easily to Be Made? Rape and Malicious Prosecution in Eighteenth-Century England.” American Journal of Legal History 42 (4): 351–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Susan S. M. 1981. Female Sexuality and the Law. Oxford: Martin Robinson.Google Scholar
Estrich, Susan. 1987. Real Rape. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Fisch, Jörg. 1983. Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law, 1769–1817. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Durba. 2006. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Matthew. 1736. History of the Pleas of the Crown. London: Sollom Emlyn.Google Scholar
Indian Law Commission. 1837. A Penal Code Prepared by the Indian Law Commissioners.Google Scholar
Kolsky, Elizabeth. 2005. “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India.” Law and History Review 23 (3): 631–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolsky, Elizabeth. 2009. Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kolsky, Elizabeth. 2010. “‘The Body Evidencing the Crime’: Rape on Trial in Colonial India, 1860–1947.” Gender & History 22 (1): 109–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mani, Lata. 1989. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds. Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh, 88–124. New Delhi: Kali for Women.Google Scholar
McCulloch, Jock. 2000. Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Morris, James. 1854. Cases Disposed of by the Sudder Foujdaree Adawlut of Bombay. Bombay: Bombay Education Press.Google Scholar
Ng, Vivien. 1987. “Ideology and Sexuality: Rape Laws in Qing China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1): 57–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. 2002. Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Paxton, Nancy. 1999. Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Powell, Arthur. 1902. “Medical Examination in Cases of Rape.” Indian Medical Gazette, June, 231–34.Google Scholar
Reports of Cases Determined in the Court of Nizamut Adalat (NAR). 1805–57.Google Scholar
Sanad, Nagaty. 1991. The Theory of Crime and Criminal Responsibility in Islamic Law: Shari'a. Chicago: Office of International Criminal Justice, University of Illinois, Chicago.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Sumit, and Sarkar, Tanika, eds. 2008. Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Tanika. 2000. “A Prehistory of Rights: The Age of Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal.” Feminist Studies 26 (3): 601–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. 1993. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Singha, Radhika. 1996. “Making the Domestic More Domestic: Criminal Law and the ‘Head of the Household,’ 1772–1843.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 33 (3): 309–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singha, Radhika. 1998. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sommer, Matthew H. 2002. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar