A Time of Emergency in Colonial India, 1914-1921

Renisa Mawani, University of British Colombia

What was the time of emergency in colonial India? In this talk, I address this question through the Ingress into India Ordinance and the Foreigners Ordinance that were issued in September 1914, one month following the outbreak of World War I and at a time of growing anticolonial insurgency.  As a mode of surveillance and preventative detention, the Ingress was aimed at Indians returning by sea from abroad. However, it was expanded to include merchants, traders, and anyone else deemed to be a threat to the British colonial government.

In his classic book, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, Nasser Hussain asks what colonial emergency might reveal about modern legality. I build on Hussain’s work to ask what the Ingress can tell us about the changing temporalities of law. If modern legality represents a synthesis of past, present, and future, emergency shifted temporal proportionality. The Ingress, I suggest, was informed by the past, deemed necessary in the present, but focused mainly on the future. The Ingress and the Foreigners Ordinance were not responses to legal transgression. Rather, they were informed by suspicions of an expanding anticolonialism that only intensified through fears of unregulated mobility in a time of colonial emergency.
 

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