Abstract

Every archive holds many stories; this paper analyses the treatment and socio-political role of the Indian goddess icon, Kali, in the early nineteenth century, considering the story of legal subjectivity through her changing depiction and worship. Kali was reimagined as a monster-like figure of hate and fear, of depravity and unchecked female sexuality, and the anti-thesis of morality, by the East India Company officers who compiled the archive on thuggee. As the icon of reverence to thuggee, an early codified crime of habitual stranglers, this paper follows Kali through her restructuring under the British imperial vision, and as a mirror-metaphor of repressed feminine energy in the legal archive. I analyse the change in Kali’s iconography under the gaze of the law and the advent of a new colonial branding made up from parts of her legend. It is through this new role that the introduction of a standardised legal framework forced Kali to become secondary to Western paternalism, a role that split her Eastern feminine aspect into separate facets. I discuss how the repression of the female voice in the thuggee archive reflects historic attitudes of engendering that echoed as a form of nomos in the twentieth century socio-political climate of Britain. Finally, I present where the feminine energy highlights the need for a subtle reorientation of the criminal law to overcome areas of recurring dissonance in service to its female subjects.