Talk by Bhavani Raman (History, University of Toronto)

The laws that authorize modern state impunity, such as martial law, sedition, disturbed areas, and preventive detention, were first given statutory authority by a colonial corporation, the East India Company consolidating its conquest of India. Why was this the case and why has this history been forgotten by historians of law, colonialism, and South Asia? While the British East India Company's conquest of India through techniques of pacification, property rights, and culturally inflected governance are well-documented, it is less widely known that it was unable to successfully define treason through its entire existence. My paper recounts this history, focusing in particular on the Company criminal legal system which was predicated on Islamic legal principles. Islamic legal practitioners in these courtrooms challenged the Company’s desire to punish treason with death, thereby challenging the colonial regime's claims to sovereignty and plunging it into periodic crises. The Company responded by installing the statutory foundations of emergency and state security. Yet its inability to sufficiently define treason has left us a prism of legal debate and an unfinished state authority through which to understand the present and the past of the relationship between right to rebellion and racialized state violence.