Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti, and: Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere by Tanya Agathocleous (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination by Leila Neti, and: Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere by Tanya Agathocleous Laura Lammasniemi (bio) Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination, by Leila Neti; pp. xi + 230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, £75.00, $103.00, $29.99 paper, $29.99 ebook. Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere, by Tanya Agathocleous; pp. xx + 211, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021, $125.00, $26.95 paper, $17.99 ebook. How were colonial laws depicted in Victorian press, literature, and cartoons? How did these cultural depictions shape the British colonial project, and what impact did they have on the ways in which imperial legal expansion was imagined? Recently, two important books have been published that explore these questions, as well as the cultural and literary dimensions of British colonial expansion and the expansion of colonial law in the Indian context: Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (2021) by Leila Neti and Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (2021) by Tanya Agathocleous. Both books focus on the Victorian imagination, legal or cultural, and Neti's book in particular reveals the limits of that imagination when it comes to colonial law and judiciary. In Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination, Neti reads carefully selected appeal cases heard in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council together with a series of classic Victorian literary texts such as Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens to analyze three distinct themes: criminality, temporality of caste, and adoption and inheritance. By reading judgments as text and focusing on the narratives within judgments and colonial law, she is able to show us the cultural connotations of these laws and their long-lasting impact. In relation to the first theme, Neti explores different representations of criminality in the wake of colonial legal expansion. As laws and notions of punishment in colonial India became unmoored from those in England, so did ideas and imagination regarding criminality. Indian criminality, such as that in Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839), was represented as inherent and irredeemable, whereas English criminality, represented by Magwitch from Great Expectations, was more humanized, with the potential for redemption and rehabilitation. These perceptions of criminality had, of course, wider ramifications in justifying the colonial project and in the denial of legal and other forms of subjecthood to those colonized due to the "inability of the Indian to develop into the citizen" (90). This notion of subjecthood and relation to one's family as much as to the state that governs us comes to the fore again in the final theme, adoption and inheritance. Yet, as compelling as the ideas of subjecthood and belonging are, I must focus on the second theme: the temporality of caste. It is in these chapters on temporality that Neti provides an important contribution to the field of Victorian literature, cultural, and legal [End Page 301] studies. She argues that as the colonial courts centered judicial decision making and their own decisions, they moved away from customs and local history. The courts "essentially rendered Indian conceptions of the past irrelevant, while also ensuring that the future would continue to be shaped by the logic of British decisions" (119). Through this powerful observation, Neti shows how colonial legal expansion went beyond legal transplants, increasing the power of the judiciary, and eventually led to the transformation of entire legal and political systems. It allowed, specifically, the British to manufacture Hindu tradition, a new history of caste, and alter thinking on temporality. The analysis of creeping legal precedent, known as the cornerstone of the common law system, and the ways in which it altered the collective imagination is then read in light of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). At times, The Moonstone is left in the shadow of Neti's excellent reading of temporality and the doctrine of precedent, yet this is a reflection of the importance of the observations she makes on temporality rather than any weakness in the literary analysis. While on the surface Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere by Tanya Agathocleous...