Colonial Lores in Legal Codes: Cast(e)ing Gender Deviance in Colonial India (1860-1901)

This thesis explores the production and regulation of gender deviance through and as caste in the mid to late nineteenth century British India. To explore the conditions that enabled this production, I develop a new conceptual and methodological lens of polymorphic colonialities. Methodologically, the lens of polymorphic colonialities offers a way to place caste and gender beside each other to understand them as co-constitutive. Conceptually, it enables an analysis of power through the structural encounter and transformation of the colonialities of caste and British rule. By critically reading the colonial archives at The British Library and The National Archives of India, the thesis develops and refines the lens of polymorphic colonialities by analysing the production of gender deviance through and as caste in three different forms of knowledge: ethnographic photography from 1860-1890 (visual form), The Criminal Tribes Act 1871 (legal form) and the census exercises from 1871-1901 (enumerative form). The thesis argues that gender deviance was produced in ethnographic photography through racialised visual codes of caste. In the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, gender deviance was criminalised through notions of hereditary "caste criminality". In the British Indian census, gender deviance was produced as caste through the creation of a hitherto non-existent caste category of "eunuchs" or "hijras", variously enumerated based on occupational criteria, social precedence ranking of caste and frames of immorality. By introducing and developing the lens of polymorphic colonialities to demonstrate how gender deviance was produced through and as caste in a highly adaptable process enabled by the epistemic and political encounter between caste and British rule, the thesis makes an intervention in gender and sexuality studies and legal historiographies.