Clare Anderson, Legible bodies. Race, criminality and colonialism in South Asia

Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia is Clare Anderson’s most recent foray into the history of punishment in colonial South Asia. In this compact but informative book, she takes up the relationship between discourses of race and criminality on the one hand, and embodied practices on the other. Her particular concern is with colonial inscriptions, descriptions and readings of the bodies of convicts, through tattooing, dress, haircuts, measurements, photography, and f..

Clare Anderson, Legible bodies. Race, criminality and colonialism in South Asia

Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia is Clare Anderson’s most recent foray into the history of punishment in colonial South Asia. In this compact but informative book, she takes up the relationship between discourses of race and criminality on the one hand, and embodied practices on the other. Her particular concern is with colonial inscriptions, descriptions and readings of the bodies of convicts, through tattooing, dress, haircuts, measurements, photography, and f..

Contexts, Representation and the Colonized Convict: Maulana Thanesari in the Andaman Islands

This article analyzes some of the key social and political dynamics of the British-Indian penal colony in the Andaman Islands, from the perspective of the individual convict. It focuses on a rare Indian convict autobiography from the nineteenth century: the Urdu memoirs of the Maulana Muhammad Jafar Thanesari, a Wahhabi Muslim activist who was arrested in 1863 for conspiring to smuggle funds to anti-British mujahideen in Afghanistan. Beginning in 1866, Thanesari spent nearly eighteen years in the penal colony, and then returned to the mainland with a new wife, new children, and considerable wealth and social status. The colonial regime’s punishment of Thanesari was quite successful, because it resulted in the conversion of a trouble-maker into a moderately satisfied and law-abiding subject of the crown. It did not, however, eradicate all inclinations and opportunities for dissent – rather, it gave new form to dissident gestures. The article focuses first on the issue of convict labor. Next, the article examines Thanesari’s perceptions of the politics of religion and race in the Andamans. The final area of analysis concerns Thanesari’s acquisition of a family in the Island.Cet article analyse certaines des principales dynamiques sociales et politiques de la colonie pénale anglo-indienne des Îles Andaman, du point de vue de l’individu détenu. Il se concentre sur l’une des rares autobiographies d’un détenu indien au XIXe siècle, les mémoires, rédigées en urdu, du Maulana Muhammad Jafar Thanesari, un militant musulman wahabite qui fut arrêté en 1863 pour avoir comploté un transfert de fonds à des mujahidines anti-britanniques en Afghanistan. À partir de 1866, Thanesari vécut près de 18 ans dans la colonie pénale, avant de revenir sur le continent avec une nouvelle épouse, de nouveaux enfants, une grande fortune et un statut social prestigieux. La punition infligée par le régime colonial à Thanesari fut efficace, puisqu’elle eut pour effet de transformer un trublion en un sujet de la Couronne plutôt satisfait et respectueux de la loi. Elle ne parvint cependant pas à éliminer toutes ses inclinations et ses occasions de dissidence, mais donna de nouvelles formes à leurs manifestations. L’article s’arrête d’abord sur la question du travail forcé. Puis il examine la perception qu’avait Thanesari de la politique religieuse et raciale dans les Andaman. Enfin, il analyse la constitution d’une famille locale par Thanesari

Convicts and coolies : rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century

This article seeks to shift the frame of analysis within which discussions of Indian indentured migration take place. It argues that colonial discourses and practices of indenture are best understood not with regard to the common historiographical framework of whether it was 'a new system of slavery', but in the context of colonial innovations in incarceration and confinement. The article shows how Indian experiences of and knowledge about transportation overseas to penal settlements informed in important ways both their own understandings and representations of migration and the colonial practices associated with the recruitment of indentured labour. In detailing the connections between two supposedly different labour regimes, it thus brings a further layer of complexity to debates around their supposed distinctions

Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India

The human body in modern South Asia has been continually manipulated into political enterprise. The body was central to the project of British colonialism, as it was in the Indian response to colonial rule. By constructing British bodies as normative and disciplined, and Indian bodies as deviant and undisciplined, the British could fashion an ideology of their own fitness for political power and defense of colonialism itself. The politics of physicality then manifested in reverse in many ways, not least through Ghandi's use of his body as public experiment in discipline, as well as a living rejection of British rule and norms of physicality