Crime Through Time

Description

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 defi nitions 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 codifi cation 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.