Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law by Elizabeth Kolsky (review)

Elizabeth Kolsky, in Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, turns our attention to the everyday violence carried out by Europeans and the brazenly light sentences sometimes handed out for these crimes by the colonial courts. Apart from the cataclysmic violence of war and conquest, Kolsky contends that ordinary violence against individual Indian men and women was constitutive of colonial rule rather than an incidental by-product. Courts and legal procedures introduced by the colonial state served increasingly to protect Europeans who had assaulted or killed Indians from harsh sentences and punitive penalties. Kolsky argues that “European judges and juries in the late nineteenth-century colonial courtrooms collaborated across hierarchies of class to buttress the racial basis of British dominance” (193).

This case is built in five chapters, the first of which turns the spotlight on colonial attempts to control non-official Europeans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kolsky uses a collection of official documents entitled “European Misconduct in India 1766–1824” to describe a climate of lawless violence and to track the anxiety of colonial officers about the unbridled aggression of those Europeans who threatened social and political stability. The drunken, wayward behaviour of seamen and military men, as Douglas Peers has shown, threatened the prestige and stability of early colonial society. The labour violence of indigo planters who enforced unfair contracts and the gender violence against wives and female domestic servants points to “the disorder and violence brought by colonial contact itself” (68). A second chapter argues that the law codes, and in particular the Code of Criminal Procedure, placed a hierarchy of racial difference at the heart of colonial law. Kolsky sees the codification of law, which began in the 1830s and was enacted in the late 1850s to early 1870s, primarily as the pragmatic response to the everyday dilemmas of unruly non-official Europeans (rather than as the consolidation of state authority).

In a third chapter, Kolsky imaginatively broadens the subject of the ways in which evidence was elicited in legal proceedings to examine both the judicial oath and, building on the work of Sudipta Sen, the means by which medico-legal experts brought evidence about the particular vulnerabilities of Indian bodies. A frequent defence made in European trials for the murder of Indians was the apparent delicacy of the Indian spleen, a defence which enabled many Europeans to be charged with lesser offences or to receive dramatically reduced sentences, even if the mortal blow had been directed at another part of the body. A fourth chapter turns the focus away from Bengal to develop a case study of tea plantations in colonial Assam, before a final chapter examines anti-colonial campaigns in the newspaper press especially to overturn the legality of white violence in the early twentieth century. In the face of the reduced charges for Europeans who had killed Indians, the editor of one Indian newspaper concluded: “The goddess of British Justice, though blind, is able to distinguish unmistakably black from white” (qtd. in Kolsky 189).

Kolsky’s compelling book resonates with several dominant themes in historical research on British imperialism; most notably, these narratives of imperial violence reflect the instability of British rule in the continent. Kolsky contributes to recent studies of gender and colonialism by Indira Chatterjee, Durba Ghosh, Philippa Levine, and others by highlighting the theme of gender violence, shown in the sometimes fatal sexual predations of white masters against women, and the place of colonial jurisprudence in buttressing male authority. In the spirit of Nicholas B. Dirks, Kolsky foregrounds the scandal of Empire in asserting that miscarriages of justice and racial enmity were not only endemic, but essential to imperial rule. At times her indictment of pervasive violence distracts Kolsky from analyses that might diminish or qualify her claims. For example...