Moglai Justice: Colonial Illegalities on the Hyderabad-Bombay Frontier

Even during the height of British rule in South Asia, the subcontinent abounded with frontiers where colonial territories jostled against enduring spaces of native sovereignty. Raj officials branded non-colonial polities as arbitrary, barbaric and archaic, contrasting them with the British India’s ostensibly ordered, civilized and modern rule of law. Such representations were used to justify expanding colonial power, and extra-territorial jurisdiction was often invoked to transgress political boundaries. This paper examines jurisdictional politics along one key internal frontier: the border between Hyderabad Princely State – a massive, autonomous Muslim-ruled state surrounded on all sides by colonial territory – and Bombay Presidency – a major constituent unit of British India. I describe the contentious and indeterminate character of legal jurisdiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along the Hyderabad-Bombay frontier viewed from the perspective of two states jockeying for position. Analyzing resonant moments and trends, the paper highlights the production of a colonial ‘black legend’ about the barbarity of justice in ‘Moglai’ Hyderabad, and the role of this rhetoric in justifying colonial violence and state illegalities. Colonial officials sought to extend power across the border through projects such as the Thagi & Dakati Department, excise policing initiatives, and other agencies for regulation, surveillance and interdiction of mobile people and commodities. For their part, Hyderabadi officials maintained sovereign legal authority to check colonial encroachment. Tracing a missing survey team, changing regulations on controlled substances (primarily liquor, but also salt, firearms, opium and ganja) and attempts to police communities allegedly given to habitual criminality, this paper probes the limits of colonial judicial power across the Hyderabad frontier.  In doing so, I seek to unravel the imperfect correspondence between colonial counter-insurgency discourses and repressive state practices, and to reconsider the workings of legal sovereignty in the modern subcontinent and the colonial world.