Illustrating the Indian Penal Code: Bigamy, the Victorian Novel, and the Formation of National Identity
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Leila Neti
Leila Neti is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College. She specializes in Victorian literature, and law and literature. Her recent book
Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the shared cultural logic of both legal opinions and novels during the Victorian era. Her published articles have appeared indifferences :A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies ,Interventions :International Journal of Postcolonial Studies ,Law and Literature ,Law and Humanities , and in various edited collections. She can be reached atlneti@oxy.edu 
Abstract
This essay argues that the Indian Penal Code (1862) served as a surrogate constitution under colonial law. Lacking a framework for civil rights, the Law Commissioners sought to bring clarity to the law by supplementing the criminal code with extensive notes and illustrations. While the IPC aspired to universality in substantive law, the notes and illustrations worked in opposition to this goal by perpetuating racial hierarchies. Using hypothetical narratives, the notes and illustrations painted a portrait of Indians as habitually criminal and unruly in their appetites and affections. The tension between the IPC’s universalist rhetoric and its persistent recourse to racial difference is exemplified in the laws dealing with marriage. Focusing especially on bigamy, the essay examines how the threat of colonial contamination both worked to discipline the Indian population and to reinforce marital normativity in England. In legal trials as well as novels, the bigamy plot captured the Victorian imagination. The fascination with bigamy, however, was also routed toward more cautionary ends. Turning to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which is typically read as a story of Jane’s development into a proper English woman, this essay shows how Rochester’s own development from colonial bigamist into faithful English husband epitomizes the Victorian legal and literary ideal.
About the author
Leila Neti is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College. She specializes in Victorian literature, and law and literature. Her recent book Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) explores the shared cultural logic of both legal opinions and novels during the Victorian era. Her published articles have appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Law and Literature, Law and Humanities, and in various edited collections. She can be reached at lneti@oxy.edu
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Constitutional Theory as Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Focus
- Charles Dickens, Albert Venn Dicey, and Openness in the Anglosphere
- Rhetoric and Empire: Constitutional Thought and Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Authoring the Nation: Madame de Staël and the Literary Origins of the State
- The End of the Victorian Era: Reflections on an Edwardian Viewpoint
- Illustrating the Indian Penal Code: Bigamy, the Victorian Novel, and the Formation of National Identity
- The Christian Year – Still Needed? John Keble on the ‘Co-Extensiveness’ of Church and State
- Research
- We Have Never Been Persons!
- A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator
- Thoughts, Words, and Promises: Fides and the Legal Significance of the Inner Sphere
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Constitutional Theory as Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Focus
- Charles Dickens, Albert Venn Dicey, and Openness in the Anglosphere
- Rhetoric and Empire: Constitutional Thought and Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Authoring the Nation: Madame de Staël and the Literary Origins of the State
- The End of the Victorian Era: Reflections on an Edwardian Viewpoint
- Illustrating the Indian Penal Code: Bigamy, the Victorian Novel, and the Formation of National Identity
- The Christian Year – Still Needed? John Keble on the ‘Co-Extensiveness’ of Church and State
- Research
- We Have Never Been Persons!
- A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator
- Thoughts, Words, and Promises: Fides and the Legal Significance of the Inner Sphere
