Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject

@article{Singha2003ColonialLA,
  title={Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject},
  author={Radhika Singha},
  journal={Studies in History},
  year={2003},
  volume={19},
  pages={126 - 87}
}
Acknowledgements: A six week fellowship organized by the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, Delhi, the Law department of Keele University, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Leeds University gave me the opportunity to research this article. I am very grateful to Prof. Ratna Kapur and Dr Ruth Fletcher for all the time and effort they put in to make this exchange programme a success. Neeladri Bhattacharya, Tanika Sarkar, Nandini Sundar, Hari and Ravi Vasudevan helped me in my… 
View on SAGE
31 Citations
Background Citations
5

31 Citations

Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract: In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in…

Conjugality, sexuality and shastras

Himachal's interaction with colonialism led to the creation of a complex socio-political milieu. Administrative necessities triggered migrations to this region from other parts of Punjab, and brought…

Troubling bodies: ‘eunuchs,’ masculinity and impotence in colonial North India

This article considers colonial masculinity from the margins, examining two groups of sexual, gender and caste subalterns classified as ‘eunuchs,’ the hijra and zenana. From the 1850s, several moral…

At the Margins of Law: Adjudicating Muslim Families in Contemporary Delhi

Author(s): Lemons, Katherine | Advisor(s): Mahmood, Saba; Cohen, Lawrence | Abstract: This dissertation explores questions of religion, law and gender in contemporary Delhi. The dissertation is based…

The male state

At the turn of the twentieth century British colonial officials imagined women in Burma to be distinctly more liberated than their sisters in other quarters of British India, but this posed a set of…

India's Women Legal Academics: Who They are and Where You May Find Them

Historically, women have been central to the shaping of Indian legal thought and scholarship but they have seldom done so from – or exclusively from – within law schools. In this chapter, we trace…

Legal and Liberal Subjects: Women's Crimes in Early Colonial India

In a compelling eighteenth-century murder case in early colonial India, two native women were tried for the murder of a twelve-year-old slave named Susannah, who had been scalded to death when one of…

The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras

  • B. Raman
  • Art
    Comparative Studies in Society and History
  • 2012
Shifts in writing technology are usually taken to mark a shift from discretionary to rule-bound, impersonal forms of government. Equating writing technology with rules, however, obscures how…

Languages of Injustice: The Culture of ‘Prize-Giving’ and Information Gathering on Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract Areas that remain understudied on female infanticide in India are information-gathering and the collaboration of elites. I examine the Company government’s shift from coercion to palliative…

Legislating the Labor Force: Sedentarization and Development in India and the United States, 1870–1915

Abstract Scholars have treated British colonial rule in India and the internal colonization of the United States in the nineteenth century as analytically distinct moments. Yet these far-flung…

References

SHOWING 1-2 OF 2 REFERENCES

Scott suggests that instead of focussing only on the project of 'decentering Europe' scholars should also examine colonial governmentality as a specific phase of imperial rule

    They said the husband might retaliate by marrying someone else

    • Age of Consent Committee
    • 1929