LEGIBLE BODIES: RACE, CRIMINOLOGY AND COLONIALISM IN SOUTH ASIA

"From the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, the British incarcerated tens of thousands of prisoners in South Asian jails and transported tens of thousands of convicts to penal settlements overseas in South East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Islands. Legible Bodies explores the treatment of these 'native criminals' and shreds light on a largely overlooked practice of empire." "British penal administrators created a series of elaborate mechanisms to render 'criminal bodies' legible. They introduced visual tags to identify prisoners and convicts, seeking to make and/or read them both as individuals and as members of broader penal categories. Scientists and ethnographers used prisonsers to explore biological and social manifestations of the Indian 'other'."--BOOK JACKET.