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The Historiography of Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Kunal M. Parker
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Extract

Within the truly prodigious outpouring of self-consciously “post-colonial” scholarship on colonial India since 1980, it is little exaggeration to state that the ontology of colonialism has been figured as difference: its production, its management, its transgression, and its obtrusion. This is the case whether the scholar's disciplinary affiliation has been anthropology, history, literary studies, politics, or sociology and whether or not the scholar has been formally associated with the now-famous Subaltern Studies series. This is also the case whether the specific subject at hand has been caste or gender, nationalism or communalism, peasants or workers, state or non-state practices, elite or non-elite discourses, formal or informal knowledges, histories or memories.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Fall 2005 , pp. 685 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2005

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References

1. There are simply too many references to supply here. If beginners were to restrict themselves to historians alone, they might consult the work of various scholars explicitly associated with the Subaltern Studies project. These include—to name only the few best known in the Western academy—Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman, Sudipta Kaviraj, Gyandendra Pandey, and Gyan Prakash. The reader could also consult the very widely received work (in certain cases the early work) of Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, Gayatri Spivak, and Sara Suleri, some of whom have also been associated with Subaltern Studies.

2. The fact that Mukherjee's and Kolsky's articles fit so comfortably within this scholarly tradition reveals something, first and foremost, about the state of colonial Indian legal history (this is emphatically not intended as a criticism of either article). Unlike American legal history, which has been driven for many decades by the efforts of scholars who are legally trained and have appointments on law faculties, colonial Indian legal history remains the product of the efforts of historians. As such, it has been thematized in keeping with the broader thematizations of Indian history. Not surprisingly, in recent years, the result has been a legal history plotted along axes of difference—for example, race, religion, caste, gender, sexuality—that pays very little attention to the quiddity of law. To my knowledge, there are no systematic book-length scholarly studies of the history of core public and private legal ideas, let alone any attempt to link such ideas to the larger sweep of Indian history.

3. Guha, Ranajit, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar ; Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

4. Benton, , Law and Colonial Cultures, 257.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 258.

6. Guha, , Dominance without Hegemony, ix.Google Scholar

7. The most sophisticated attempts to work out the relationship between history and difference in this context are Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar and Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

8. Mehta, Uday, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199), 212–13.Google Scholar

9. Bentham, Jeremy, “Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 1:177.Google Scholar

10. Mehta, , Liberalism and Empire,214.Google Scholar

11. Mukherjee, , “Justice, War, and the Imperium,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

13. Quoted in Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 175, 172.

14. See Lieberman, David, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an account of Mansfield.

15. See “Epilogue: Criminal Law and the Colonial Public,” in Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 286–311.Google Scholar

16. This was particularly true of peninsular India, but—one can surmise—not unique to it. See, e.g., Arunima, G., “A Vindication of the Rights of Women: Families and Legal Change in Nineteenth-Century Malabar,” in Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia, ed. Anderson, Michael R. and Guha, Sumit (1998)Google Scholar ; Parker, Kunal M., “‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes’: Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1800–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998): 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Bentham, , “Essay on the Influence of Time,” 174.Google Scholar