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Here they are in no particular order (after the jump):
1. Chemical Examiner’s report for Punjab, 1879:
The chemical examiners were a network of military physicians who ran state
toxicology labs across British India and Burma. Each lab produced an annual
report, and we have these from the 1870s until Indian independence in 1947. The
British Library (BL) has the most complete collection, some of which is (painfully!)
on microfilm. CE reports are the hub of my book’s research. They are incredibly
rich quantitatively, although I didn’t do much there as I am not trained in quantitative
methods. Instead, I used the short case studies (usually 1-3 sentences)
described in the forensic section of each report. Among this body of primary
sources, one report stood out: the Punjab CE’s
report for 1879. As sometimes happen in the setting of empire, there was a “colonial
summary” moment when the author of the source offered a comprehensive portrait
to their superiors who probably knew little about the situation. This
one report is the most thorough portrait I could find of how the CE system developed
and worked. If you read just one CE report, make it this one! [Source: “Report
of the CE to Government, Punjab, for the Year 1879” (IOR/V/24/418); also available
in “Papers, compiled in 1960s, relating to the work of the CE, including an
extract from the 1879 Report to the Punjab Government” (MSS Eur F161/183), British Library]
2. Charts listing court appearances of the Chief Inspector of Explosives (CIE), 1927-31: These charts offer incredible detail as to when and where the CIE served as an expert in court, particularly in political bomb cases as the anti-colonial movement gained momentum in India. People always think of the non-violent strand of the nationalist movement led by former barrister M. K. Gandhi. But there was also the violent revolutionary part of the movement, led by former barrister Shyamji Krishnavarma, among others. (Both Gandhi and Krishnavarma were Inner Temple barristers who were expelled from the Inn for their political activity and then reinstated a century later. E-mail me if you’d like a scan of my article on Krishnavarma’s disbarment.) I really wanted to do more with these documents, but in the end did not. Someone should use these charts to locate newspaper stories (and other sources) about these trials in order to build up a fuller picture of the highly political work of this forensic expert in the decades before independence. [Sources: “Summoning of the Chief Inspector of Explosives to give evidence in Criminal Courts,” Home: Judicial. 1928. Progs. No.738; and “Untitled chart listing court appearances of Chief Inspector and Inspectors of Explosives, 1929–31,” Home: Judicial, 1932, Progs. no. 332, National Archives of India.]
3. Book on poisoners and counterfeiters: Quite late in my research, I discovered M. Pauparao Naidu’s book, The History of Professional Poisoners and Coiners of India (Madras: Higginbotham, 1912), which is a riveting read. I used an image from this book in mine showing mug shots of “Six poisoners” (fig.3). Photos of people convicted of crimes of deception were rare in colonial India. This book is interesting on “native mendacity” stereotypes because the author is not British (which would have been more common on a topic like this in the 1910s), but South Asian. One reads this book with a combination of horror and fascination with the ingenuity of these tricksters. I could not find a digitized version of this book.
4. Everything you need to know about how criminal trials worked: This treatise usually had all the answers for me on technical aspects of how criminal trials worked in British India: A. C. Ganguly, Practical Guide to Criminal Court Practice (Calcutta: Eastern Law House, 1937). It ended up being easier to use than the many treatises on the Criminal Procedure Code and Indian Evidence Act. It has also been very useful when I’ve been asked questions by murder mystery authors writing novels set in colonial India (I recommend the Perveen Mistry series by Sujata Massey!). A digitized version of this book is available on Internet Archive here.
5. Interracial criminal cases as anti-colonial critique: Law report volumes are usually quite dry as collections of cases. Not this one. Ram Gopal Sanyal published in one volume a series of case summaries (including excerpts from newspapers and judgments) involving 19th-century interracial criminal cases with British defendants: Ram Gopal Sanyal, The Record of Criminal Cases, as between Europeans and Natives for the Last Hundred Years (Calcutta, 1896), 2nd ed. The anti-colonial message was powerful and received major blowback from the British establishment, as the book’s Prefaces and Appendix show. Somehow Sanyal still managed to publish an expanded 2nd edition. I was blown away by this book, although in the end I only made limited use of it because my book focused on cases between South Asians. A digitized version of this title is available on Hathi Trust and Internet Archive via the Public Library of India.
6. An anti-colonial newspaper that did not get shut down: This was my first time doing extensive research with the English- and Bengali-language newspaper, Amrita Bazar Patrika, and I have come away in awe of the boldness and improbable survival of this newspaper, given its scathing anti-colonial critique. I found some incredible stories here while researching wrongful convictions (and the fear of them) in the pre-DNA and Innocence movement era. These cases appear in ch.1 of my book, and they made no appearance in pro-British digitized dailies like the Times of India. Surveillance of South Asian newspapers by the colonial state was heavy, as anyone who has looked at the reports on the vernacular press (BL) knows, and there were many sedition cases against South Asian newspaper editors. I am amazed that ABP managed to survive; it seems that sarcasm was a useful strategy. For teaching purposes, ABP stories and Sanyal’s cases above would make a great combo. Many issues are digitized and available through the BL’s Endangered Archive Program, the Heidelberg repository, JSTOR’s South Asia Open Archives, and perhaps elsewhere. I was sad to learn that after 123 years of publishing, the newspaper closed down in 1991 because of financial troubles.
7. My favorite criminal law journal from colonial India: The Criminal Law Journal of India is mostly law reports but also includes a short section of articles. I found some real gems here, and plan to come back to this journal for a future project on law publishing. Some issues are digitized and available via Internet Archive, Google Books, South Asia Commons, and perhaps elsewhere. From the days before any of it was digitized, I posted article titles here for 1904-44. Extensive physical collections are at Columbia Law Library and SOAS.
8. My favorite medical journal from colonial India: The Indian Medical Gazette includes quite a bit of forensic coverage. I hired students to go through it and they found lots of great articles there, including obituaries of leading experts in medical jurisprudence. Issues from this journal are digitized and available through medical databases like PubMed (including PubMed Central Open Access) and through JSTOR, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and probably elsewhere.
9. Medical jurisprudence treatises: These treatises constitute an incredibly rich body of published primary sources for anyone working at the intersection of law, science, and medicine. See my book’s bibliography for details on treatises by Chevers, Lyon, Hehir and Gribble, Modi, and others. One research strategy is to go through multiple editions of the same treatise to trace change over time—or to compare different authors’ treatises from around the same time to identify differences between them. The British Library has a great collection, and there are digitized editions on Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, and elsewhere. I also have a small collection of scans that I am happy to share.
10. W. D. Sutherland’s lectures to the Detective Training School at Howrah, 1918: The Imperial Serologist gave two lectures to trainee detectives that are quite remarkable, not just for the breadth of topics covered—from sex crimes to adipocere (“soap corpses”)—but also for what they reveal about European stereotypes about criminality in a colonial context. [Source: “Notes of a lecture delivered at the Detective Training School, Howrah by Colonel Sutherland, Government Serologist” [1918], no. 1, 2 (unpaginated) in Papers of Ormandy Ballantine Fane Sewell (MSS Eur F419), British Library.]
Please e-mail me if you have difficulty gaining access to anything described
here: mitra.sharafi@wisc.edu
-Mitra Sharafi
