Introduction: Modern and Colonial Law as Inchoate

The new criminal sciences, influenced by racist and eugenic theories, shaped much of the criminal justice administration and process in Victorian England. Within the image of the criminal was an identifiable, if diffuse, ethnic class, composed of the ayahs, of the lascars, and of the larger emerging black population of industrial England. Crucial to the articulation of those identities is the history of England as a colonial regime. The discourses of the racial Other and of the criminal type, especially the physiognomic type, once again finds its replica in the Indian subject. The aim of the following Chapters, 6 and 7, is not only to explore the transportation of Victorian legal definitions to imperial India, but also the scientific typologies and categorizations used to subjugate the colonial subject. More pointedly, Victorian definitions of race, related components of eugenic theory and especially anthropometry, eventually came to reinforce a decaying Indian caste system as an instrument of imperial categorization and rule. This way of ‘knowing’ the Indian society, especially in the census, the imperial gazettes and legislation, fulfilled the needs of the imperial state. With the end of the EIC's sovereignty, the criminal justice process in imperial India accumulated many of the same elements of collective discretionary legislation and of policing controls as were found in Victorian England. The freebooters of the eighteenth century gave way to the bureaucrats of the nineteenth century.