Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 128)

Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena. Cover 1 Half-title 3 Series information 4 Title page 5 Copyright information 6 Dedication 7 Contents 9 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 15 The Privy Council 16 The Heteroglossia of Colonial Law 19 Making Law 21 Colonial Law as Narrative 26 Law and Literature 28 Reading the Archives 33 Legal Fictions: The Law as Text 35 The Archive 37 Periodization 39 On Appeal: The Docket 40 Part I Criminality 45 Chapter 1 ''Power Able to Overawe Them All'': Criminality and the Uses of Fear 47 Representing the Defendants 50 Imaginative Life and the Biopolitics of Fear 53 Capitalizing on Fear 56 Affect and Effect 59 ''Terror and Example'' 64 ''All Benefit to Be Expected from a Public Example'' 67 The Spectacle of Violence 71 Another Eduljee 74 Chapter 2 The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug 77 Thug Lives 79 ''And Strike Terror into the English Government'' 82 Crime and Its Punishment 92 ''The Terror of Childhood'' 93 Reforming the Criminal 99 The Name of the Father 100 Reframing the Thug 106 Part II Temporality 109 Chapter 3 Injurious Pasts: The Temporality of Caste 111 Ordering the Courts 114 Brahminism and the Law 118 The Biopolitics of Bureaucracy 121 Litigating Time 124 Beyond Memory and History 127 The Temporality of the Law 128 Establishing Precedents 132 Chapter 4 On Time: How Fiction Writes History in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone 136 Setting the Stage 139 Sectarianism and Subjection 144 Opposing Temporalities 147 Fictional Historicism 149 The Law of Time 151 The Mystery of History 153 ''The Influence of Character'' 156 Part III Adoption and Inheritance 161 Chapter 5 The Begum's Fortune: Adoption, Inheritance, and Private Property 163 Family Politics 168 Love Beyond Kinship: An Unfamiliar Bequest 171 ''A Faithful Friend of the Company'' 173 Privacy and Property 178 The Last Word 183 Narratives of Adoption 188 Chapter 6 Foundlings and Adoptees: Filiality in the Novels of George Eliot 190 By Right of Blood 193 The Coming of the Child 196 A Family Conjured from Gold 199 Adoption as Social Stigma 202 ''I Am Not My Father's Son'' 206 ''Not Quite a Human Mother'' 210 Adopting the Faith 213 Love and the Sacred Inheritance 216 Adoption's Uncertain Horizons 220 Afterword 223 The Discourse of Justice 225 Fiction and Reality: A Case in Point 227 The Afterlife of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 231 Notes 234 Introduction 234 Chapter 1 241 Chapter 2 248 Chapter 3 254 Chapter 4 259 Chapter 5 265 Chapter 6 273 Afterword 283 Bibliography 286 Index 303 "Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination reads works of fiction from the nineteenth century alongside three legal cases heard before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which was the highest court of appeal for colonies within the British Empire. By pairing legal judgments with novels by prominent Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Philip Meadows Taylor, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, I show how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, the broader ideals of imperial expansionism during the nineteenth century. Rather than thinking of the legal and literary realms as distinct, however, I read the judicial opinions as instances of narrative that share many of the same tropes and strategies typical to the nineteenth-century novel. The legal cases in the study are summarized in Moore's Indian Appeals, a 14-volume catalog of appeals from Indian courts to the Privy Council from 1836 to 1872. The written summaries of the cases, consumed as texts, were the main avenue through which an English audience could become acquainted with legal disputes in India. And, as is clear from my readings of the judicial opinions, the Privy Council used modes of narrativity (to organize temporality, character, plot etc.) that were also commonplace in Victorian literature. Reading the legal texts as literature allows us to explore the division between reality and fiction, and to look at the ways in which legal opinions created norms that intersected, often unpredictably, with other forms of cultural representation. As this book demonstrates, reading the archives of the JCPC and the Victorian novel together opens up a series of questions. Does fiction shape materiality in ways that are similar to how materiality shapes fiction? Does reading a text as fiction create different strategies and avenues of interpretation? Is what we think of as reality possible outside of the turns of imagination that we recognize in fiction? These are some of the questions that motivate this study and which Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination seeks to answer"-- Provided by publisher Focusing on criminality, caste, inheritance and adoption, this text illustrates how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, broader Victorian ideological norms, appealing to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, colonial and legal history, and particularly Indian colonial culture. Examines the shared cultural genealogy of popular Victorian novels and judicial opinions of the Privy Council