Although crime is often considered natural, it is entirely social: the product of a combination of factors including mechanisms of discipline and punishment, modes of social control, and their subversions.
Part of the prestigious Themes in Indian History series, this volume explores the relationship between law, crime, politics, and culture in historical perspective. Thereby, it reveals the dynamic interaction between states and subjects as these shape intimate lives and social experiences.
The essays in this volume explore shifting definitions of crime over the last three centuries in South Asia, spanning the early modern, colonial, and postcolonial periods. They take up a range of themes including: the significance of banditry; the construction of 'criminal' communities; the codification of colonial law; the effects of native policing; the scandal of sexuality from the 'infanticidal' woman to the female outlaw; and emergent relations between legalities and illegalities, violence and politics, and the licit and illicit in colonial and postcolonial society.
The introduction is capacious, imaginative, and incisive in its discussion of the diverse histories that frame the discourses and practices of crime in the region.
Not so long ago, as we planned Crime through Time, our minds moved not to the past but to the present, to literature rather than history. We were struck by the manner in which Aravind Adiga's recent, prize- winning novel, The White Tiger, posed provocative questions about crime as the practice of social critique. This was reminiscent of our own conversations about the centrality of law, violence, and the state to projects of collective action and self-making. Put simply, in Adiga's work, we found an exploration of the violence of caste hatred and class hostility in globalizing India, and of the reproduction of privilege through the distinct, if related, registers of 'feudal' and 'modern' modes of power in these terrains. Such concerns resonate powerfully with our own attempts to understand crime and criminality as historical constructions. Produced within the interstices of state-society relations and governed by shifting ideas about normative conduct and legitimate punishment, these constructions ever entail pasts that continue into the present.
Now, the focal concern of Adiga's literary ethnographic gaze is the contemporary violence of everyday life, alongside the amorality of India's emergent middle classes, more generally. With their crude penchant for conspicuous consumption, here are social groups that continue to rely on a large service class of domestic workers-drivers, ayahs, chaukidars-whose labour sustains them. Rather more than their ownership of the latest dishwashers and plasma TVs, what is distinctive about this globalizing elite is their power over living labour, the latter often relegated to servants' quarters, forced to register with the police, issued passes to enter gated-communities, routinely under paid, and frequently corporeally disciplined.
It follows that even as cultural forms of hierarchical subordination are increasingly redefined and legitimized as salaried work, what is noteworthy is the fear among the middle-classes of subaltern violence provoked by disparities of wealth. This fear coexists with the middle-classes (necessarily unmet, ever deferred) aspirations sustained by seductions of endless consumer goods and the good life. At the same time, the mutual hostility between domestic workers and their employers incites a range of behaviours on the part of the former, from petty thievery to class violence.
Recall that in the novel, Balram Halwai, an intimate witness to his master's ethical degeneration, engages in turn in an act of 'purifying violence. Balram kills his master. This fight-unto-death between master and servant is also a struggle for social recognition. Here, Adiga suggests that the servant's brutalization is produced by, and equally enables, the further brutalization of society. At the same time, rather than remake the social order through revolutionary violence, the fixer, the trickster, and the scamster of urban India now stands in the place of the state, including especially the latter's monopoly over legitimate violence.
Adiga's dystopic vision replicates broader trends in Indian popular and political cultures today, which turn on the mimetic interchange between law and violence. For example, such mutual begetting of the licit and the illicit significantly structures popular films about Bombay's underworld, which were inaugurated by Ram Gopal Verma's Satya, and that now inform sub-metro variants of underworlds such as Omkara. And so, too, the symmetries and asymmetries of order and excess produced within the blockbuster Rang de Basanti are incorporated into the more indie No One Killed Jessica, each as cinema and reality. The point is that even as the Indian state retreats from its earlier commitments to social welfare and collective enfranchisement, violence, instead of pedagogical transformation, appears to be the mode of political communication between social classes, while the middle-classes oppose the state through their innate entitlements.
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