“Ocean Bombay” is a social history of a colonial city of itinerants. Between 1839 and 1937 the actions of the British Indian colonial state and itinerancy upon one another shaped both the borders of the newly independent nations in 1947 and the changing notions of community and human relationship with space in the South Asian subcontinent. This dissertation charts the story of that development by studying itinerant groups staking their belonging to communities and space in colonial, port Bombay: Sidi shipworkers, Bombay-Aden merchants, Irani cafe owners, nomadic groups, publishers, filmmakers, and actresses. In doing so I intervene in the urban historiography of the city by writing about Bombay’s forgotten transoceanic past as a port city straddling the transformation of the subcontinent from colonial state to nation-state. Further, I rethink the concepts of “community” and border-making as used in South Asian historical and theoretical thinking by examining them through the lens of itinerancy and gender. “Ocean Bombay” thus locates Bombay society at the intersection of several oceanic geographies, through the study of an archive built from fragments and interviews collected across India, the United Kingdom, and Iran.

Colonial Detection tracks the checkered career of criminal detection, a distinct mode of producing knowledge about crime in the nineteenth century, that relied on the cognitive model of retrospective reconstruction. The dissertation traces its emergence and consolidation in nineteenth century British India as a form of inter-departmental bureaucratic work for government agents at the interface of police investigations, magisterial inquiry, and forensic scientific research. At the same time, it follows the circulation of this model of thinking backward from clues, beyond state institutions, into the domain of popular discourse about crime, investigation, and evidence. Histories of evidence law in the common law world, studied till date as a largely Anglo-American story, tend to focus predominantly on the evaluation of information after they are presented as evidence to judges, juries, and lawyers. Colonial Detection departs from these received histories and recuperates an alternative history of common law evidence from the archives of nineteenth century British India. With a sustained focus on historical developments in the Bengal Province, it shows how legal norms of evidence and inquiry in the colony were indelibly shaped by the exigencies of criminal ‘detection,’ i.e., the investigation of crime and the production of evidence, far away from criminal courts, and long before the commencement of trials.