Several scholars of South Asia have analyzed how colonial officials sought to categorize, discipline, and reform populations as matters of public and administrative concern. From the regulation of women’s reproductive lives to the expansion of carceral labor regimes, our panel traces how the punitive and reformist impulses of legal administration were often deeply entangled. While Rashmi Banerjee’s paper shows how policemen, judges, prison administrators, and local administrators regularly showed legal restraint and moral ‘sympathy,’ Soumys Johri’s paper highlights brutal coercion at their hands in all spheres, from the work site to poorly ventilated jails to dieting measures that led to high mortality rates amongst penal laborers. Such contradictory attitudes highlight the ambivalent and shifting nature of colonialism that emerged in South Asia since the early nineteenth century.

At the same time, our panel foregrounds the ways in which Indian actors negotiated with and often shaped the colonial regime in practice. Shantanu Havaldar’s paper on the princely states highlights the struggles between British agents and courtly actors, illuminating how colonial authority was negotiated through gendered notions of power and competing visions of political legitimacy. Concurrently, Pranav Gulukota reveals how social and political movements articulated critiques of colonial power that drew on internationalist ideologies while grappling with local social, economic, and political conditions.

Our panel places these diverse histories in conversation by drawing upon a range of sources in multiple languages, including legal cases, extant prison records, newspaper and journal publications, as well as personal and official correspondence across multiple archives in India, the UK, and the US. The panel also speaks to questions of historical change across the long nineteenth century and into the era of decolonization. By tracing continuities and ruptures in administrative practices, the papers reveal how colonial institutions adapted to new crises while carrying forward older logics of rule.

Therefore, taken together, our papers demonstrate how colonial rule was produced through diverse interactions that frequently exceeded the intentions of the state itself. More broadly, they challenge the teleological narratives of colonial modernization as well as nationalist resistance. The realities of colonial encounters in South Asia played out in different ways across time and space, as well as within caste and class hierarchies.