We have the following news from the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History:
The Honors Committee is pleased to announce the election of Professor Radhika Singha, recently retired from the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. Professor Singha is a pioneering historian of law in South Asia, the author of innovative and inspiring studies of criminal law and imperial regulation, and a revered advisor to a generation of scholars who have turned South Asian legal history into a dynamic field of research. Her work transcends imperial, national, and regional boundaries, shifts the focus of legal studies away from familiar European and American contexts, and has widened the range of international legal history.
Professor Singha began her studies in history in India and earned an M.A. degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). She then studied at Cambridge University, completing her Ph.D. in 1990. She returned to India where she taught at three universities: Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University, and, from 2002 until her retirement in 2021, at JNU. At JNU, India’s leading university for the humanities and social sciences, Professor Singha advised and, it is fair to say, formed a new generation of scholars who have brought the history of South Asia into mainstreams of academic life in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Professor Singha’s exceptional scholarship has been recognized by institutional appointments, invitations, and fellowships in the U.K., the USA, Ireland, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Professor Singha’s monograph, Crime and Criminal Justice in Colonial India, published by Oxford University Press in 1998, was based on Singha’s research into the entwined trajectories of colonial, Company, and regional law. This study remains a major reference point on the development of criminal law in India under Company rule and has influenced scholarly work in many fields, well beyond South Asia studies.
Singha’s other master monograph, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-21, also published by Oxford (2019), tells the story of the half-million Indian non-combatant workers who were drafted into the murderous campaigns of the British in World War One and its imperial follow-up. This brilliant, lively, and compelling work explores the regulation of military labor by British and local authorities, as well as the impact of the “coolies’” service on legal possibilities, life, and politics in post-war India. While many have written about or at least paid heed to the Indian soldiers who fought for Britain, no one had thought to recover the history of the half million so-called “non-combatants” who were brought into British service as military “followers.” Yet these were the people who cleaned up the multiple messes of the war, who carried stretchers, prepared food, and were at the beck and call of British officers. The topic itself was new, but so is Singha’s move of the war’s history out from its usual Eurocentric frame and into a global, trans-imperial context.
Singha’s attention to the colonial state’s impact on the lives of laborers, outcasts, and subordinated groups runs through her whole oeuvre, as does her vast knowledge of legal technologies in a colonial context. Her expertise on the British Code of Criminal Procedure underlies her studies of surveillance and policing, enabling her to highlight the discretionary element in codification. She has addressed questions of identification, and pursued the extensive efforts at regulating mobility inside and out of British colonies, as well as the intersection of military law with legal history. Singha never tells a single story: race, religion, gender, and status all matter for the endeavors, reforms, setbacks, cruelty and creativity of imperial rule and its challengers.
The nomination of Radhika Singha elicited an outpouring of admiration for her qualities as a teacher. In her position at JNU, the home of India’s national archives, Singha encouraged and supported the research of scholars who subsequently became professors in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere in the now much wider world of legal history, of South Asia, and of empire studies.
It would be good if our citation could end on a high note, but we find ourselves in a time when the enormous achievements of Indian scholarship are being undermined by an orchestrated assault on academic freedom and quality. JNU, India’s premier university where Singha inspired so many students, is under attack, including physical violence against students, and prison sentences for both faculty and students. Professor Singha closes the acknowledgments in her recent monograph as follows: “I wish I could find words to express the full measure of my admiration for those students, teachers and staff of JNU who, in the face of sustained intimidation, defend liberal values and keep visible those being abandoned as citizens.” Let us join in recognizing Professor Singha, who has done so much to inspire commitment to these principles, with an honorary fellowship in the American Society for Legal History.
Other honorary fellows have been noted in separate posts.
-- Karen Tani
