Gandhi, Tilak, and the Problem of Imperial Mercy

If the bloody legacies of colonial violence remain a site of heated debate in postimperial Britain, in postcolonial India it is the history of mercy that continues to court controversy. Feverish debates around which leaders took mercy, and why, continue to appear across newspaper columns, primetime TV debates, and during election campaigns.  And yet while the provision of mercy during colonial rule has remained a salient and politically charged contemporary issue, we lack a serious conceptual or historical understanding of the precise role played by mercy in colonial India. Drawing on my current book project, Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Terror and the Making of Criminal Law, this paper compares and contrasts the central place of mercy in the political imaginaries of B.G. Tilak and M.K. Gandhi in the first two decades of the twentieth century.