Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform ed. by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo (review)

In 1860, the Indian Penal Code was introduced into India, the brainchild of Thomas Babington Macaulay who had drafted the code during his time in Bengal in the 1830s. Viewed by many as the best example of Benthamite legal principles put into action, with its emphasis upon “lucidity and accessibility of provisions, and consistency of expression and application” (vii), the Indian Penal Code would later be replicated in other colonial territories, notably Nigeria, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Malaysia (including Singapore). It provided the foundations for a stillborn attempt at codification in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century and would inform the evolution of criminal law in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Indian Penal Code is consequently examined here through a very wide-angle imperial lens.

Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code consists of four parts. The first consists of two chapters that provide a historical framing for the Indian Penal Code, locating its origins within efforts at legal reform in early nineteenth-century Britain. The following three parts, which comprise the bulk of this book, address the legacies of the Indian Penal Code, and in particular seek to provide some guidance as to how the Indian Penal Code, and those codes modeled upon it, can be refreshed and made more suitable to the societies in which they are operating. The essays are consistently of very high quality, and as they originated in a 2010 conference at the National University of Singapore that was expressly held to look at the Indian Penal Code on its 150th anniversary, the collection as a whole has a higher degree of coherence than is often the case with collections of essays. The discussions in many of the essays are underpinned by a concern over the fact that one of Macaulay’s key objectives was that the Code would be periodically revisited and revised by the legislative rather than the judicial branch of government. This foundational principle, however, was largely absent when it was enacted in 1860. Consequently, the history of the Indian Penal Code has been a “narrative of neglect and uneven amendment,” both in its original Indian form and its subsequent appearance elsewhere within the Empire (7). The stated aim of this collection is to encourage the articulation of a set of “general principles of criminal law” that could be implemented and which would be true to what Macaulay had laid out in the 1830s (13).

Ironically, while legal scholars such as those assembled here are quick to recognize the significance of the Indian Penal Code, principally because of its current impact and capacity to inform further legal reform but also because of its potential to serve as a means through which we can explore nineteenth-century governmentality across a wide imperial landscape, historians of India and of empire more generally have skipped over it. Macaulay is much better known for his sweeping denunciation of Indian learning: his statement “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabic” has become akin to boilerplate text in many works that detail the increasingly antagonistic views of India by Britons in the nineteenth century (“Minute on Higher Education” in Selected Writings, edited by John Clive and Thomas Pinney [1972], 241–42). Macaulay’s efforts to use education as a means to Anglicize Indians have been the subject of many studies, and as an example of colonial intent, its analysis is certainly merited. But the actual impact of his “Minute on Education” (1835) can be easily overestimated as compared with its rhetorical value. Not only was there a lack of consensus over who best and how best to educate (James Mill, the other great utilitarian figure associated with India in this period, disagreed...