Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination

• Published in: Victorian studies 2023, Vol.65 (2), p.301-304
• Main Author: Lammasniemi, Laura
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: British Empire; Case studies; Children; Cultural factors; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); E-books; Imagination; Inheritances; Law; Periodicals; Sedition; Victorian period; White supremacy
• ISSN: 0042-5222; 1527-2052
• DOI: 10.2979/victorianstudies.65.2.05

Both books focus on the Victorian imagination, legal or cultural, and Neti's book in particular reveals the limits of that imagination when it comes to colonial law and judiciary. Where Neti excels in her analysis of law, legal cultures, and legal imagination, in Agathocleous's book, sedition law itself takes a back seat, as the focus is on print cultures and how such cultures and editors navigated and responded to anti-sedition laws in colonial India. In the first case study on affectation, an earlier version of which was published in Victorian Studies ("Criticism on Trial: Colonizing Affect in the Late-Victorian Empire" [2018]), Agathocleous focuses on legal trials, mainly through Queen Empress vjogendra Chunder Bose and others (1892), the first sedition trial brought against the proprietors and editors of Bangavasi for authoring and publishing a series of articles strongly opposing the Age of Consent Act 1891. Discussing disaffection here as a question of the expansion of the British Empire versus male Hindu rights to sex with a child bride, without fully engaging with the wider social reform context that cultural, social, and legal historians have explored over the past decades, has the potential to diminish the impact of what Ashwini Tambe has succinctly described as "colluding patriarchies" and the influence of colluding patriarchies on the contemporary discourse around the 1891 Act