Mitra Sharafi, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia

The archives of colonial India bristle with allegations that Britain’s Indian subjects were inveterate, even compulsive, liars. The notorious trope of ‘native mendacity’ spurred a ‘fear of the false’ among legal officials, who designed rules of evidence and scientific techniques to discourage and detect dissimulation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, forensic science was a global phenomenon. Medical experts, or at least their written reports, were ubiquitous in criminal law processes from investigation to incarceration. Scientific knowledge and biological samples flowed through international networks. But as the growing literature on the history of forensic science shows, local contexts shaped medico-legal priorities, meanings, and practices. Mitra Sharafi’s Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia surveys the development of forensic science in colonial South Asia to ask: ‘What was colonial about colonial forensics?’ (p. 2, emphasis original). Fear of the False is divided into two parts: ‘Falsity from Without’ and ‘Falsity from Within’. The first sets out obstacles to discovering the truth of a crime in colonial India. Challenges ranged from the dizzying array of plant and animal poisons in Indian ecosystems to a distrust of sexual assault victims sharpened by racial and gender-based bias. Colonial officials worried that ‘native mendacity’ would produce wrongful convictions: as Sharafi observes, a colonial innocence movement ‘inspired by racial bias, rather than envisioned as a corrective to it’ (p. 29, emphasis original). These concerns led to the creation of a class of Chemical Examiners (CEs) responsible for testing samples in regional laboratories. India’s climate made shipping biological matter difficult. Until the widespread adoption of insulated train cars in the mid-twentieth century, forensic experts were likely to receive, as one CE put it, ‘bottles of putrid viscera’ to test—if samples could be collected at all prior to a decedent’s cremation (p. 46; p. 159). Sharafi stresses the dialogue between scientific practices, such as staining techniques that could identify even sperm cells that had lost their distinctive tails and debates about how to preserve specimens, and the rules of evidence that defined how scientific knowledge could be presented and weighed in court.