Anglo-Indian publics policed colonial difference through law and censorship

Evidence

Historians have often associated the Anglo-Indian public with demands to bend the rule of law to uphold white privilege and enforce Indian subordination. Examining the suppression in the early 1860s of an English translation of the Bengali drama Nil Darpan, which exposed the exploitative nature of forced indigo cultivation, Partha Chatterjee has argued that the Anglo-Indian public claimed the exclusive right to criticize government policy and demanded censorship of the vernacular public. Elaborating on Chatterjee’s concept of the ‘rule of colonial difference’, Elizabeth Kolsky has documented the systematic suspension of the rule of law in cases involving white Britons perpetrating violence against Indians. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 142

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out Chatterjee’s ‘rule of colonial difference’ and Kolsky’s extension of it as a compact scholarly framework.
• SHARE: The Nil Darpan suppression detail — a Bengali play about forced indigo cultivation censored by Anglo-Indian pressure — is a niche gem for a historian of empire or censorship.