1. You
can take publication-grade photos with your phone: Perhaps this is obvious
to others, but I
assumed the only way I could get publication-quality versions
of images for my book that I took at the British Library (pictured) would be to order
images through the BL’s Imaging Services. Unfortunately, the BL was hit with a
ransomware attack in 2023. BL leadership refused to pay the ransom, and their
online catalogue was destroyed as promised. It took the BL several years to
recover (they are still not back to how things were before), and their Imaging
services were essentially shut down so they could concentrate all their efforts
on reconstructing the catalogue. For about a year, I thought this meant I could
not include about a third the images I planned to use for my book, which was
devastating. But then my IT colleague showed me how to use my phone to re-take
the images at the BL (I could still go there and order up the original items,
fortunately). By putting the phone on a stack of books to avoid any tilt or
handshaking, and by adding 1-2 light sources, I retook these images and they were
good enough to publish. The BL gave me permission to reproduce these for free,
happily.
More after the jump.
2. Book bombs: One of the strangest crimes I came across in my research was book bombs: the insertion of a small bomb into a hollowed-out hard cover book. The most memorable case for us legal historians is undoubtedly a law book bomb. In 1909, a parcel containing a law book tied up with string was sent to Mr. Kingsford, Chief Magistrate in Calcutta. I was glad to get a reference to this into my book’s opening paragraph. Kingsford assumed it was a law book he had loaned out being returned, so he didn’t open it. Upon inspection, the Chief Inspector of Explosives discovered that 600 pages of a 1,200-page law book had been scooped out to make space for a picric acid-based bomb. (Picric acid was a favorite substance used by revolutionary anti-colonial bombmakers, staining one’s hands yellow.) “The springs were set in such a manner that on the cutting of the string with which the book was tied up the cover would fly open and a detonator of fulminate of mercury would be struck by a nail. The springs had rusted but the explosive was found intact." (source: Times of India, 15 March 1909).
5. On caste and historical passports: This point is perhaps not surprising, given the importance of caste categories and British bureaucratic data collection (in the census, for instance). But I did not assume that I could figure out a historical figure’s caste affiliation by finding their passport. Caste affiliation may be identifiable by name, but not necessarily, plus there are regional variations. The British Library has an amazing collection of colonial-era passports, which were big pieces of folded up paper (not yet booklets). There, despite a typo in the name spelling, I found the passport of J. P. Modi, who was the first really famous South Asian author of a medical jurisprudence treatise. “Modi’s Juris” remains a leading treatise cited in Indian courts today. I wanted to figure out if there was any bias against lower caste groups in Modi’s treatise, but I wasn’t sure where Modi himself fit into the caste hierarchy. His passport identified him as being part of the Vaishya community, which was a middling caste. This find allowed me to suggest that Modi may have embraced stereotypes about lower caste mendacity. This was relevant for my analysis of a photo showing a dalit man’s wounded inner arm; he blamed it on a rival, but Modi was convinced the man had made the cuts himself. Finding the passport let me do more with caste, even if there was some speculation involved.
7. Missing from the archives: There were two things I spent a lot of time hunting for in my research—in vain. One was a physical example of a chemical examiner’s certificate. The chemical examiners were a network of military physicians who ran regional toxicology labs for the state. When a sample from a human or animal body was sent in, having been collected at a potential crime scene, the CEs would test it and produce a certificate that would be key evidence in court. A big focus of my book is India’s Criminal Procedure Code s.510 (as it was formerly numbered)—an unusual rule that did not exist in England that that allowed CEs not to come to court to be cross-examined under oath on the basis of their certificate. They could simply submit their certificate and be done with it. This could lead to wrongful convictions where the report was cryptic, incomplete, or misleading—and it made expert misconduct harder for the courts to identify. The CEs’ annual reports were my main hub of primary sources for this project. And yet I could not find a single actual certificate in any archive in India or the UK. The second thing I was hoping to find was signs of early forensic entomology. Today, the analysis of insects like maggots and blue bottle flies helps experts determine the time and sometimes the place of death of a body (here is a fascinating memoir that I use in undergrad teaching). I also knew that in France and its empire, this field had started to develop in the period I was looking at. Scientific experts in French, German, and English-speaking circuits were in touch at the upper levels, reading and citing each others’ work. But I could find nothing for British India except perhaps for a case where finding a parasite prevalent in tropical climates called filaria nocturna was forensically useful. Unlike some scholars, I hesitate to make too much at the conceptual level of an absence or omission in my primary sources. What could be a deliberate removal by those in power could equally be a fire, flood, or wartime bombing that led to the obliteration of relevant sources or to some bureaucratic process that meant that the document type was never saved in the first place. Every project has lines of research that the author hoped would take off but never did, and that are usually invisible to the reader. These were two of mine.
8. Pandemic primary sources: I spent many years doing the really hard archival research involving unpublished primary sources at the National Archives of India in Delhi and at the BL in London. I think I had some idea at the back of my mind that prioritizing published primary sources was too easy. But then when the pandemic hit, things started looking different for all of us. For my project, I then dug properly into the published body of medical jurisprudence treatises for India, an incredibly rich body of primary sources that had been sitting in front me the whole time, often digitized on Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, or Google Books. It’s an obvious point but the lesson is: not all of your primary source research needs to be hard!
9. Experimental archive trips: A Law School colleague who was getting into archival research once asked me if it was worth it to make a short trip to an archive where it was possible that they’d find absolutely nothing. My view is that you win some and you lose some, but that it’s always worthwhile to try. This trip for me was to the Glasgow University Archives to look at the papers of L. A. Waddell, a Scottish chemical examiner in colonial India and author of a leading medical jurisprudence treatise. Initially, it seemed like the whole trip had been a waste, because it became clear immediately that Waddell’s papers related almost entirely to his hobby—collecting materials on Eurasian archaeology and mythology. The only place I found hints of his forensic day job was on the back of his scrap paper! However, I am now thinking about doing a future article with the scrap paper theme, plus I did end up using a photo of Waddell from the collection. And I stumbled upon the very disturbing fact that Waddell was corresponding with Arnold Leese, head of the Imperial Fascist League, and writing book reviews for the League in 1937-39. I could not link this to his forensic work, but I did get it into a footnote in the book.
10. Developmental editor: A growing trend in scholarly monograph-writing among historians is the use of a personal or developmental editor. I hired Pamela Haag and got tough but excellent feedback from her, which led me to remove one chapter from the book (to turn into an article soon). The sad truth is that academic friends and colleagues used to do this for each other, but now no one has time because we’re all drowning in e-mail.
-Mitra Sharafi
1.