Speaker: Bhavani Raman, University of Toronto
Chair: Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Department of HUSS, IIT Delhi
Title: VIRAL SEDITION AND THE ETHICS OF REBELLION IN EARLY COLONIAL INDIA
Abstract:
This talk explores the pre-history of India’s colonial sedition law by tracing how it first emerged as a public order problem—and how, paradoxically, its circulation in everyday life helped to shape an ethics of rebellion. Long before sedition was written into the Indian Penal Code in 1870, the East India Company sought to establish its authority by controlling public sentiment. As I will show, its attempts to restrict speech and public assembly stemmed from a sovereign void at the heart of its enterprise. The Company could not prosecute influential figures, such as British journalists writing for English-language newspapers, or Muslim religious preachers active in the countryside and in Company barracks, for treason. The public order restraints on speech that followed culminated in the 1870 sedition law which sought to govern speech pre-emptively as a crime against the state. By then, however, the idea of sedition had taken root in non-state imaginaries and undergone a reversal, where it came to signify a moral and ethical obligation to rebel. How might this history help us understand the relationship between law and affect—across English and South Asian language publics, and between state and non-state domains of governance?
Speaker Bio:
Bhavani Raman is Associate Professor, University of Toronto. She is the author of Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial India (Permanent Black Press, 2015).