ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between colonialism and penality. Drawing on the history of South Asia, I develop my argument by beginning first with a contrast. On the one hand, we find in mainstream accounts within supposedly ‘critical’ criminologies a startlingly simplistic presentation of colonialism as simple, pure, or unalloyed repression. Repression was undoubtedly a feature of colonial penal power, and I detail many examples of how it was the case on the Indian subcontinent. But such approaches hardly explain why colonial penal power was so durable, so effective, or why we still wrestle with it today. To understand that we need to recognize a second, larger formation: that which made colonial penal power productive. What we find, when looking critically, when we change lenses, is that penal power in India was also productive: it produced flexible spaces of plural legality and penality, highly nuanced grids of control across social spaces, and modes of plural and often tolerant penal governance. The enduring, residual, power of colonial penalities today thus arises not because colonial power was a big stick or a heavy hammer, though it often was both of those. The omnipresence and difficulty of escaping colonial penal power reflect the difficulty of escaping, of getting outside, these modalities of its productive renewal, established in colonial locations but now a universal inheritance.
