Cyborgs, Torturers, and the Making of Forensic Psychological Knowledge
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Abstract
In the nineteenth century, when the utilitarians’ attempts to deliver scientific jurisprudence to England fell flat, they got India as a consolation prize. In the colony, they saw opportunities to build a legal apparatus that not only would surpass what it supplanted but also would be superior to anything comparable anywhere. With important allies on their side, they would codify law free of ambiguity and dispense justice unencumbered by custom. In this way, they would transform colonial society and demonstrate what might yet be achieved in the metropole. Theirs was legal science in action; the rule of law as technology—and India was a vast laboratory for a grand experiment in modernity. The utilitarians’ splendid vision for a system of law in which all hidden worlds would be revealed and everything disorderly would be put to order was never realized. From the outset, there were too many competing interests, too many hands at work, too many compromises demanded. Moreover, the utilitarian logics that were written into codified law had unintended consequences. Legal mechanisms designed for objectivity produced impunity. Police officers recognized that the formal bar on confessions obtained through inducement, threat, or promise did not so much prohibit torture as delineate circumstances for its use. Senior officers typically attributed custodial abuses to the purported shortcomings of colonized subjects rather than acknowledge them as the specific results of the experiment in codification. Courts and legislators in democratic India have since tried to prevent torture, but their efforts have been contradictory and the results mixed. As Jinee Lokaneeta (2011) showed in her first book Transnational Torture, Indian jurisprudence is more ambivalent about torture than lawyers and human rights activists tend to think. Judges introduce legal safeguards against custodial abuses yet tolerate a lot of other practices on a spectrum of state violence that ends in torture. They also remain bound to many of the positive terms and conditions imposed by colonial predecessors as well as by their