Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1, 4. In doing so, Europeans rarely faced legal prosecution for their acts essentially placing themselves above the law. The stresses and strains associated with this colonial racial fault line has been laid bare by the numerous instances of everyday acts of violence committed against Indians by, for example, European indigo and tea planters and off-duty soldiers. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 10. Partha Chatterjee has pointed out that, as an alien conquest regime, the British colonial state's laws were a product of what he calls the rule of “colonial difference” reflecting the British sense of isolation and racial segregation from their Indian subjects. See also Jan Wilson, India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 293–317. Rather than colonial governance being grounded upon the principles of legal objectivity and universal equality as embodied in the rule of law, Ranajit Guha has claimed that the British exercised “dominance without hegemony,” since their rule amounted to “an autocracy that ruled without consent.” Guha, Ranajit, “ Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23 ( 1997): 485 CrossRef Google Scholar. British support of principles and practice of the rule of law in India have been questioned by a number of scholars. Yang (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 108–27 Nigam, Sanjay, “ Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27 ( 1990): 257–87 CrossRef Google Scholar Mark Brown, Penal Power and Colonial Rule (Abington: Routledge, 2014) and Hinchy, Jessica, “ Gender, Family and the Policing of the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in Nineteenth-Century North India,” Modern Asian Studies 54 ( 2020): 1669–711 CrossRef Google Scholar.Ĥ. Yang, “Dangerous Castes and Tribes: The Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doms of Northeast India,” in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Kolsky, Elizabeth, “ The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier ‘Fanaticism’ and State Violence in British India,” American Historical Review 120 ( 2015): 1218–46 CrossRef Google Scholar Condos, Mark, “ License to Kill: The Murderous Outrageous Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925,” Modern Asian Studies 50 ( 2016): 479– 517 CrossRef Google Scholar Anand A. Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India ( New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) Google Scholar Kim A.
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