The early mornings in Nellikuppam began with a hush; not silence, exactly, but a stillness that settles just before the world remembers what it owes. Somewhere, a rooster called out too early. Elsewhere, a kettle rattled against heat. The breeze carried with it the thick, ghost-sweet scent of molasses from the town’s sugar factory– the scent of something boiled, burned, and sharp, settling deep in our lungs and memories alike.
In the backroom of our family home, my grandfather sat on the edge of a wooden cot, adjusting his cracked leather shoes. His hands worked with certainty carved from decades of labor within the factory down the road. Outside, the machines awoke, unrelenting and exacting as the pulse in his bones.
There was pride in his work; the wages were modest but dependable, the routine steady enough to stake a life on. Still, his soft fulfillment carried weight that he and the rest of the town rarely named. The land beneath his feet, once tenderly cared for by generations long before colonial shadows fell, was parceled by surveyors, claimed by distant powers, inscribed in ledgers, and stripped of its communal meaning. The damage of extraction, I was told, ended in 1947 when India gained independence. If that were true, I never understood why the townspeople still moved in codes—why the body bore the heavy yoke of conformity, where discipline and utility came before any claim to agency. Why a borrowed shawl worn across the “wrong” shoulders or the barest outline of flesh spilling free from a plunging neckline could quiet and then disturb a room, or why softness in speech or gesture was met with averted eyes, as if recognition itself were dangerous. His pride in duty was real, but it was textured by lines drawn erratically through maps, etched into posture, measured through productivity, and reinforced by the careful choreography of who one was permitted to become.
Nellikuppam, my grandfather’s hometown, lies on Tamil Nadu’s eastern coast, where sugarcane fields stretch like a verdant tide toward the horizon. Before the British arrived on Indian shores, this land was held in a shared trust, governed by planting and harvest cycles, and sustained by communal traditions revering earth as a living, breathing entity integral to social and spiritual life. Labor was a collective act of stewardship, weaving kin and community into reciprocal bonds of responsibility.
This balance of land, labor, and life underpinned the public health and resilience of native communities and ecosystems. British colonial conquest fractured these foundations. Following their decisive victories at Plassey in 1757 and Buxar in 1764, the British imposed new regimes of land tenure and taxation explicitly designed to satisfy the voracious demands of imperial extraction. This marked the beginning of an empire sustained by military conquest and a sophisticated arsenal of fiscal experiments aimed at reshaping native land—what they presumed to be a disordered terrain—into a governable “civil” society.
The instruments of colonial extraction were adaptive by design, calibrated to the contours of land and the temperaments of its people. British administrators closely studied Indian society through its social perforations: caste hierarchies, kinship obligations, and tangled lines of debt, identifying the precise levers that might bend a population toward compliance, before tearing at the dotted lines. Their rule did not depend on brute force alone, but thrived on a calculated intimacy, extending power even in absence by transforming villagers into tax collectors, landlords into enforcers, and neighbors into informants. Through these mechanisms, the British Empire made its presence acutely felt, embedding itself into the daily transactions of labor, architectures of trust, and in the gestures of tradition, faith, and selfhood.
In Tamil Nadu and other southern provinces, the Ryotwari land revenue structure placed individual cultivators, ryots, in direct contractual relationships with the colonial state. This system imposed fixed tax obligations based on “productive capacity” regardless of soil fertility, seasonal hardship, or market fluctuations. Stripped of the communal protections that had once buffered risk, many ryots fell into crippling debt, lost ancestral land, and faced downward social mobility, as failure to meet tax demands often meant forfeiting entire tracts to British control.
Meanwhile, in Bengal, northern, and central India, the Zamindari and Mahalwari systems allowed the British imperial project to capitalize on social hierarchies to permit self-policing. The Zamindari system installed native upper-caste landlords, who were themselves subject to colonial subjugation, as hereditary tax intermediaries, granting them wealth and unchecked authority to extract rent from peasants. The Mahalwari system, on the other hand, made entire villages collectively responsible for tax revenue while concentrating power in the hands of dominant-caste headmen, who enforced compliance and discipline within the community.
The lands seized by the British came with promises: industrial jobs that would provide fiscal security to displaced peoples, neatly structured social and political systems, and technological progress meant to make them competitive alongside Western nations. Factories soon rose beside these stolen fields, built to crush masses of sugarcane and convert harvests into imperial profit. The sugar produced and exported by the British East India Company was shipped in bulk across oceans to sweeten the palates of Western consumers—strangers who would never touch the soil it came from nor know the names of those whose sweat, breath, and blood made it consumable.
However, for many peasants dispossessed from their ancestral lands, these new factories offered no assured refuge. The sugar mills manufactured a surplus labor pool, a reservoir deliberately maintained to suppress wages and enforce discipline through replaceability. Many were relegated to informal labor, subsistence farming, or domestic work, economic roles rendered invisible and unsupported by colonial policy. The grinding poverty that engulfed those shut out from British India’s industrial “new deal” was inevitable, though this swelling underclass threatened the colonial regime’s carefully constructed myth of order. Faced with an expanding marginalized population they neither desired nor could fully control, British authorities confronted a dilemma: eradicate these “undesirable” groups altogether or devise new, more insidious mechanisms of governance that extended imperial dominion into the very fabric of everyday life, and pave the way for their eventual elimination.
The Indian Penal Code (IPC), enacted in 1860, embodied this larger strategy. Ostensibly a rational and comprehensive legal framework designed to impose uniform order across the vast and heterogeneous territories of British India, the IPC functioned as a juridical veneer. Its surface gleamed with the promise of impartial justice in official discourse, yet it concealed a formidable apparatus that granted the colonial state sweeping powers to criminalize difference, punish distance, and suppress identities. This legal code was accompanied by the rapid expansion of a carceral infrastructure: overcrowded, unsanitary jails; penal colonies such as those in the Andaman and Nicobar islands; and systems of forced labor that conscripted prisoners into constructing the very roads, buildings, and institutions that extended colonial rule. In laying the foundation for the modern criminal legal and carceral systems in India, the British-developed IPC restructured the longstanding relationship between the state and its subjects through both surveillance and dispossession.
One of the clearest illustrations of this strategy can be found in the colonial criminalization of gender and sexuality. Section 377 of the IPC, introduced just one year after the code’s enactment, outlawed “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” a vague formulation rooted in British Christian morality that granted the British-colonial state broad authority to police intimacy, embodiment, and relational life.
Among those caught in the tightening grip of British policing were hijras, known as thirunangai in Tamil Nadu, individuals whose very existence challenged binary definitions of gender and sexuality. Traditionally, hijras held recognized roles as ritual specialists in South Asian society, called upon to bless births and marriages with songs, dances, and sacred authority. Their power was rooted in their third-gender status, which often included a voluntary renunciation of procreative capacity in devotion to the goddess Bahuchara Mata. Hijras encompass a diverse spectrum of identities, including transgender, intersex, and genderqueer individuals. Their identity has long been rooted in close-knit community bonds and mentorship. Many leave their natal homes to join hijra communities through a guru-chela (teacher-disciple) system, where they learn secret rituals passed down through generations. While their religious authority made them indispensable to many Hindu households, it posed a challenge to colonial visions of bodily discipline.
In response, some hijras were institutionalized, incarcerated, and many subjected to routine public humiliation for existing outside the imaginations of gendered respectability. The colonial state unleashed the full force of its power to extinguish ambiguity, relentlessly punishing those who lived in the interstices between man and woman, public and private, self and citizen. This was biopolitical governance stripped to its most ruthless form.
Many colonial-era laws and institutions endured long after India gained independence, continuing to uphold discrimination and exclusion. Yet, incremental legal reforms have begun to challenge this legacy. In 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down Section 377 of the IPC, decriminalizing consensual same-sex relations between adults. Protections against caste-based discrimination have been enshrined in law, and land reform efforts sought to dismantle colonial intermediaries and redistribute land to marginalized cultivators. Still, enforcement of these reforms has been uneven and often shaped by enduring hierarchies of wealth and power. In many ways, the colonial project embedded generational scripts about who is seen as human, as worthy, as grievable. And those lessons, too, have proven difficult to unlearn, especially among those whose ancestors, having gained proximity to whiteness, internalized and enforced its norms as essential currencies of safety, status, and survival. For those denied this conditional privilege during and after British rule, and for their descendants across the diaspora, the consequences of colonization endure as intergenerational trauma and survival strategies honed to escape scrutiny.
The history and legacy of colonial authoritarianism in India compels me to reflect on the present moment in the United States, both what it has become and what it is becoming. There are unmistakable patterns; legal systems wielded as instruments of justice but as mechanisms of domination; the deliberate fabrication of internal enemies to fracture communities and preempt collective resistance; and the weaponization of “respectability” to police identity, suppress dissent, and uphold power hierarchies. Such regimes selectively elevate “model subjects” who conform to dominant norms, whether along lines of race, class, gender, or ideology, outsourcing enforcement and embedding control deep within everyday social relations. In this process, the most vulnerable, often excluded from legal protections and stripped from the cultural spaces that once valued them without law, are reshaped into economic cogs serving the very system that marginalizes them.
In India, institutions originally built to extract labor and wealth for colonial powers, factories, plantations, and sprawling infrastructure, transformed into the foundations of postcolonial economies. Their persistence ensured that authoritarian dynamics, deeply rooted in colonial rule, found fertile ground to endure and evolve. My grandfather’s long hours working in a factory erected by colonial interests reveal how economic survival demanded his silent acquiescence decades later.
Even within these possibilities and dynamics, radical imaginaries of justice, solidarity, and freedom can and have emerged from the margins. For example, hijra communities during and after British colonization resisted erasure by building networks of mutual aid, cultural affirmation, and creative expression. Their resilience invites us to ask: How do we reclaim the imagination of freedom from the very systems that have defined and constrained it? And what might we create, if we no longer asked power for permission to be free?
Authored by Deepika Baskar
Deepika Baskar is a public health practitioner, narrative researcher, and artist whose work confronts the enduring legacies of imperialism and economic violence as they materialize within medical, legal, and institutional landscapes, seeking to transform how care is delivered and how health justice is contested, claimed, and reimagined. Drawing on familial histories of migration, labor, and generational relationship to land and place, their practice and inquiry critically examine how intersecting axes of identity and inequality structure the governance of bodies across borders.
