Crime And Criminality In British India

Laws that were imposed by colonizers were as much an attempt to confirm their own identity as to control the more dangerous elements of a potentially unruly populace. This title uses material from both British Parliamentary Papers and colonial archive material to provide evidence of legal change and response.

This book explores how colonial policies converted itinerant groups on the one hand into a source of cheap labour and on the other into a category known as criminal tribes . It also examines missionary activity especially the Salvation Army, in the Madras Presidency in the nineteenth century.

This pioneering and innovative study paces women in India at the height of colonial rule at the centre of analysis. Drawing upon rare English and Marathi archival materials, Padma Anagol makes a compelling case for the birth of Indian feminism before the coming of Gandhi by also illustrating how collective movements to improve the status of women in India were based upon a consciousness of the inequalities in gender relations.