by ANINDITA GHOSH
The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment
in Colonial Calcutta by Sumanta Banerjee
(Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan), 2009; pp ix + 643, Rs 795.
The Wicked City is yet another tremendously rich and exciting contribution from a veteran of the 19th century Calcutta archives. In this book, Banerjee paints an unremitting picture of Calcutta’s crime world from the late 18th to the early 20th century. We learn both of a range of crime and criminals – from embezzlers and swindlers to ruthless murderers – as well as the surveillance regimes instituted to check them. While Part 1 of the book focuses on the social history of crime in the city, the second half is an account of the institution of the metropolitan police in Calcutta, and the penal web of criminal justice courts and the prison system. Two themes underline this study: one, the disparities of colonial policing with its inevitable slant towards Europeans, and two, the bitter socio-economic circumstances of colonial crime itself.
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