A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present

Subaltern Lives uses biographical fragments of the lives of convicts, captives, sailors, slaves, indentured labourers and indigenous peoples to build a fascinating new picture of colonial life in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean. Moving between India, Africa, Mauritius, Burma, Singapore, Ceylon, the Andaman Islands and the Australian colonies, Clare Anderson offers fresh readings of the nature and significance of 'networked' Empire. She reveals the importance of penal transportation for colonial expansion and sheds new light on convict experiences of penal settlements and colonies, as well as the relationship between convictism, punishment and colonial labour regimes. The book also explores the nature of colonial society during this period and embeds subaltern biographies into key events like the abolition of slavery, the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the Indian Revolt of 1857. This is an important new perspective on British colonialism which also opens up new possibilities for the writing of history itself.

Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920

The narratives of fear and uncertainty from the discourse of the ‘global war on terror’ have been used by many governments to expand securitization processes. As more aggressive security tactics have been deployed, scholars have sought to understand the changing relationship between individual rights and the authority of sovereign states by drawing on Giorgio Agamben's insights into the state of exception. In this paper I argue that borderlands are a key site for investigating the connections between the state of exception and securitization processes because political borders are the symbolic markers of the limits of a sovereign's authority. I trace the securitization of the borderlands between India and Bangladesh and I describe the increasingly exceptional measures employed by Indian border security forces in order to prevent terrorist threats from entering India. At the intersection of the state of exception in the borderlands and the securitization narratives and practices of the global war on terror...

/pdf/agents-of-exception-border-security-and-the-marginalization-2nu1ge3opp.pdf

Agents of Exception: Border Security and the Marginalization of Muslims in India

This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the ‘global war on terror’ by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the ‘enemy other’ in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders.

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~reecej/Jones%202009%20Transactions.pdf

Geopolitical boundary narratives, the global war on terror and border fencing in India

This bibliographic essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of convict labour from a global and long-term perspective. First the conditions conducive to the emergence and transformation of convict labour are addressed by framing this coercive labour form within broader classifications of labour relations and by discussing its connection with the problem of governmentality. Subsequently, an overview of the literature is undertaken in the form of a journey across time, space, and different regimes of punishment. Finally, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, the possibility of a longer-term (pre-1500) and global history of convict labour is considered, and some theoretical and methodological approaches are suggested that could favour this task.

/pdf/writing-a-global-history-of-convict-labour-4dvxcwgu8v.pdf

Writing a Global History of Convict Labour

This book examines the implications for Indian society and politics of laws that are made to tackle events and situations out of the ordinary By reviewing public debates, comparing specific clauses of the laws and noting how they have been interpreted over time in judicial pronouncements, the author: shows how notions like nation, national identity and patriotism get entrenched in discourses on terrorism, conspiracy and national security; observes how extraordinary measures become 'normal' and acquire a place of permanence in the practices of the state; and concludes that extra-ordinary laws serve as instruments through which the hegemonic structures of the nation state are maintained

The State, Democracy and Anti-Terror Laws in India

As the constitutional body that conducts elections, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has emerged as a trusted institution within the shared space of democracy in India. This process has, however, been a fraught one because of contestation over the ECI’s constitutional responsibility and the power of Parliament to make laws to govern electoral matters. This comprehensive monograph discusses the history of the ECI through a study of the measures it has adopted to ensure certainty of procedures in order to maintain the democratic uncertainty of electoral outcome. In this context, innovations such as the Model Code of Conduct have enhanced the rule-making powers of the ECI. Going beyond the ECI’s design and performance framework, Singh and Roy argue that changes in the nature of electoral contests and domination of political regimes have made the task of preserving electoral integrity and assuring its deliberative content a challenging one.

Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties

The Politics of 'Political' Prisonerhood in Colonial and Independent India Sedition, 'Dangerousness', Penal Policies: Militant Nationalism and the Colonial State 'Crime' of Conscience: Satyagraha and Penal policy in Early 1920s Political Prisoners, Colonial State and Congress Regimes in the 1920s and 1930s 1940s: The Painful Transition Political Prisoners and Penal Startegies in Independent India Bibliography Index

Political Prisoners in India

This paper unravels the diverse strands in the manifestations of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA, 2002), focusing not only on law’s words, i.e. the rules, principles and procedures, and its interpretations in judgments, but also on its effects. Adopting the violence of jurisprudence approach, it eschews the dichotomy between law and violence, examining the ‘effects of legal force’, in particular, the ways in which law becomes an integral part of the organization of state violence. Through an examination of the unfolding of POTA and laws dealing with ‘organized crime’ and ‘unlawful activities’ (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, 2005), the trajectory of specific cases and judgments by Trial Courts, the High Courts and the Supreme Court, this paper shows how through an interlocking of the ordinary and extraordinary, anti-terror laws erode both the procedural and substantive aspects of the rule of law, become the terrain where permutations in alliance politics and configuration of power are play...

The Silent Erosion: Anti-Terror Laws and Shifting Contours of Jurisprudence in India

The code of citizenship marks out the “other,” continually reproducing and re-inscribing it through legal and judicial pronouncement in a relationship of contradictory cohabitation. The relationship is, however, not one of exclusion or simple opposition, but rather that of forclusion, where the outsider is present discursively and constitutively in delineations of citizenship. This article examines the manner in which the process of forclusion unfolded in the delineation of citizenship in Assam, in northeastern India, in particular in the contests around the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal Act [IMDT] of 1983, and the complex reconfiguration of political forces and power relations between the Center and the state of Assam on the question of definition and identification of illegal migrants. The authors examine the contests over the IMDT Act, in the context of the elections in Assam in 1983, the Assam Accord of 1985, and the Supreme Court Judgment in August 2005 striking it down. They show how th...

Ujjwal Kumar Singh

Papers

The State, Democracy and Anti-Terror Laws in India

Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties

Political Prisoners in India

The Silent Erosion: Anti-Terror Laws and Shifting Contours of Jurisprudence in India

The ambivalence of citizenship