Challenging The Rules(s) of Law
Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India
- Kalpana Kannabiran - Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, India
- Ranbir Singh - Vice-Chancellor, National Law University, Delhi
Challenging the Rule(s) of Law: Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India contests unproblematic assumptions of the rule of law and opens out avenues for a renewed and radical study of criminal law in the country. The collection looks at the problem of criminal law from the early colonial period to the present, examining the problem of overt violence by state actors and their compliance with dominant private actors. It calls into question the denial by the state of the wherewithal for bare life, which compounds people’s vulnerability to a repressive rule of law.
This work is a must read for students, researchers and faculty of Law, Criminal Law, Criminology, Legal History, Human Rights, Sociology of Law and Colonial History. It will also be invaluable for law historians, legal scholars and policy makers, especially the judiciary.
The book is, both a challenging and an exciting preposition, challenging, because it brings together the intellectual initiatives of the nineteen contributors drawn from different social sciences disciplines, working on diverse crime themes, in pre-colonial, colonial and post colonial time-frame in one large volume; and exciting, because it endeavors to run the two thought streams, namely, human rights and criminology in almost all the essays…. In a sense all the essays can be seen as an excellent basic material for developing indigenous or subaltern criminology for India that needs to be different and more society focused than the prevalent mainstream criminology.
The book is a serious attempt at a critical assessment of the theory and practice of the rule of law, criminology and human rights in India…. This volume is a solid contribution to the study of criminology, criminal law, criminal justice and human rights in India and should be of great interest to scholars and activists in the field.
