Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism (review)

Clare Anderson’s Legible Bodies offers a richly detailed and well-written contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the complex nexus between colonial knowledge and colonial power. The work of Edward Said opened up a whole new way of understanding the scope and nature of imperialism by demonstrating that cultural technologies of rule were as important as political, economic, and military ones.¹ Even before Said, Bernard Cohn’s wide-ranging essays on law, language, clothing, museums, and census reports persuasively argued that the objectification of India made it ready for rule.² As Cohn put it, “the conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge.”³ Anderson’s book skillfully builds on the existing literature on culture and colonialism by foregrounding the physical body as a site of colonial control. Anderson’s primary argument is that the colonial state sought to inscribe colonial power on the bodies of convicts and prisoners through the use of various techniques of identification, such as anthropometric photography, penal tattoos, and phrenology. Anderson is also careful to point out that colonial efforts to render the bodies of prisoners and convicts legible were uneven and diverse, which she takes as evidence of the failures and ambiguities of colonial regimes.

Legible Bodies is comprised of an introduction and five chapters, each of which takes up a different set of colonial experiments used to make the criminal body visible and stable, beginning with penal tattoos and ending with retinology. Anderson’s arguments about these technologies of criminal identification are doubled in two important ways. First, Anderson shows how these technologies were used on the Indian body both to differentiate individuals by making a permanent record of their identity and to construct broader social groupings and hierarchies along the lines of race, caste, and criminality. Second, she repeatedly exposes the lines of fracture between the clarity of colonial discourse and the ambiguities and unevenness of practice. In this respect, Anderson explicitly locates her work in the tradition of David Arnold who has also emphasized both the power of colonialism and its failures in his important studies of colonial medicine, science and prisons.⁴

Anderson offers a nice back and forth reading of metropole and colony, placing the two in a unitary field of historical analysis and interrogating what was particularly colonial about modern experiments with criminal identification in British India. In his groundbreaking study published almost a half-century ago, Eric Stokes argued that the Indian colony served as an experimental site to test out ideas and institutions that were precluded at home due to a growing public sphere of debate and contestation.⁵ Anderson takes this insight a step further by showing that jails and penal settlements were even better sites for colonial experiments as the state had almost complete and unfettered access to the bodies of convicts and prisoners – those held in captivity had little to no ability to deny either the photographer’s lens or the anthropometrist’s calipers.

In the first chapter, Anderson argues that penal tattoos (godna) ideally represented “the literal embodiment of colonial rule (28).” Penal tattoos were adopted by the colonial state in the late eighteenth century as a pre-colonial practice that both verified criminal identity and permanently displayed it, thereby offering a deterrent to escape as the identity of the criminal and his crime was fixed on the body. The cover illustration of the book offers a chilling example of godna, depicting a prisoner with the words “DOOMGA” and “MURDER” permanently etched into his forehead. Drawing on a notion of resistance evocative of James C. Scott’s weapons of the weak, Anderson argues that convicts sometimes subverted the totalizing control of penal tattoos by avoiding, concealing and removing them.⁶

In subsequent chapters, Anderson closely follows colonial experiments with anthropometry, photography, finger-printing and phrenology and situates them within the larger project to know and control India by producing biological data – rather than social data like that provided by the census – that slotted individuals into “a fully legible social hierarchy (58).” By the twentieth...