Book contents
- Trials of Sovereignty
- Studies in Legal History
- Trials of Sovereignty
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and Table
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Forgetting War and Punishing Crime
- 2 The Peace: The Queen’s Proclamation and the Politics of Forgiveness
- 3 The Code: Judges, Juries, and Punishing Difference
- 4 Discretion, the Death Penalty, and the Criminal Trial
- 5 Pardons and Scaffolds
- 6 Tilak’s Radical Innocence: Mercy, Sedition, and the State Trial
- 7 Gandhi’s Guilt and the Return of War
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Legal History
5 - Pardons and Scaffolds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2024
- Trials of Sovereignty
- Studies in Legal History
- Trials of Sovereignty
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and Table
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Forgetting War and Punishing Crime
- 2 The Peace: The Queen’s Proclamation and the Politics of Forgiveness
- 3 The Code: Judges, Juries, and Punishing Difference
- 4 Discretion, the Death Penalty, and the Criminal Trial
- 5 Pardons and Scaffolds
- 6 Tilak’s Radical Innocence: Mercy, Sedition, and the State Trial
- 7 Gandhi’s Guilt and the Return of War
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Legal History
Summary
Chapter Six offers a careful reading of the first two sedition trials of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1898 and 1908). While existing scholarship has studied his subversive performances within the courtroom, I extend this analysis to incorporate his efforts at winning executive mercy and commutation from prison. More than any other political leader, Tilak spent his imprisonment exhausting every avenue to petition and appeal against his sentence. This included multiple approaches to the Privy Council and serious plans to petition the House of Lords. In an important and original breakthrough in anticolonial political thought, it was when Tilak failed to win freedom on the basis of justice alone that he connected the availability of mercy to the curtailment of political rights in India.
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- Trials of SovereigntyMercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857–1922, pp. 185 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024