Scholars in Conversation l Professor Mitra Sharafi with Assistant Professor Kunal Ambasta

The ‘Scholars in Conversation’ series features interviews with academics across diverse disciplines and geographies. Anchored by NLSIU faculty members, these conversations explore the work of leading voices in their fields in order to bring academic insights to bear on public discourse.

In March 2025, the university brought together researchers, scholars, and students to discuss the evolving approaches to researching, teaching, and writing legal history in South Asia. At this conference—Contours of Legal History in India, conducted by NLSIU and Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory—Mitra Sharafi, a legal historian with a focus on South Asia and the Evjue-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, delivered an interactive talk on the introduction of systems of forensic science into the colonial Indian legal system. This keynote address was based on the research in her forthcoming book, provisionally titled, Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia (Cornell University Press).

On the heels of this conference, NLSIU faculty member Kunal Ambasta—whose research areas include the criminal justice system, the law of evidence and proof, and the interface between law, sexuality, and gender identity—conducted an email interview with Sharafi.

In this conversation, produced below, Ambasta and Sharafi explore the use of forensic science and the construction of ‘truth’ in criminal trials and the possible colonial roots of these ideas in the Indian legal system. They also discuss how colonial legacies relating to forensic science may persist in criminal procedure, notwithstanding efforts at ostensible decolonisation, and what this may mean for the fairness of criminal trials. Finally, Sharafi also offers her insights on what would constitute a ‘de-colonial’ forensic science.

The use of forensic science in criminal investigations has often been presented as a more objective and reliable means of uncovering the truth when compared to human testimony. We see the same ideas being presented even today when it comes to techniques such as DNA analysis. Do you think this idea of science being better at uncovering the truth has roots in the colonial legal regime and the manner in which it constructed an idea of forensic truth?

The drive to replace human testimony with scientific testing did not play out exclusively in a colonial context like British India. But it was ‘on steroids’ there because of the heightened mistrust between British colonial officials and the colonised population. The ‘native mendacity’ stereotype is a big theme in my forthcoming book, and it was a major driver of developments in forensic science in colonial South Asia.

I agree that this assumption is still with us today, particularly given our recognition of the malleability of human memory (in eyewitness testimony, for example) and of the warped incentives often at work in ‘jailhouse snitch’ testimony. And yet, forensic science can be messy, too. It may involve interpretation and judgement calls by the analyst, differences of opinion among experts, and competing methods and schools of thought. Some types of forensic analysis based on similarity analysis between two samples (like toolmarks or textile fibres) are backed up by very little peer-reviewed scientific research. And even evidence from fields that are considered more scientifically solid—like DNA analysis or toxicology—can be subject to inadvertent contamination, expert misconduct, or the planting of false evidence by police. So, it is crucial to probe forensic science-based evidence, just like human testimony, in the courtroom. It’s not that forensic science is more reliable than human testimony in all cases; it’s that the hazards are different.

Would you say that the idea of the forensic and scientific truth assumes a peculiar meaning when it comes to a colonial context? Was it used as an experiment in the colonies to be subsequently introduced in the metropole? We have seen this idea around legal codification in India, and I was wondering whether similar motives animated the introduction of scientific investigation techniques in India?

The concept of truth promoted by colonial forensic actors in India was one grounded in Western science, allopathic medicine, and Anglo-legal models of individual responsibility and causation. Furthermore, colonial law and forensic science were not only trying to do the everyday work of solving crimes by discovering the truth. They were also doing ‘macro’ political work: the rule-of-law agenda and Western science were pillars of the civilising mission. Rhetorically at least, Western law and science were used to justify British rule. This made it extra important that they not be manipulated through the planting of false evidence (the focus of Part 1 of my forthcoming book).

About experimentation: some forensic techniques were tried out in the colonial context before being used in the metropole. For example, the precipitin test (species-of-origin bloodstain testing) was used extensively in India in the 1910s and 1920s, but the courts in England did not start accepting it until the 1930s. However, there are also many examples where the perceived needs of the state or common types of crime were different in the colony than in the metropole. In such instances, the forensic technique was not tried out in the colony first. There were two separate tracks, and the technique was kept on the colonial track alone. For instance, cow poisoning cases were a big focus of the chemical examiners (state toxicologists) in Hindu-majority parts of British India. These were cases—actual or alleged—with complex inter-caste dynamics. One method of cow poisoning was to insert a rag infused with snake venom into the cow’s rectum or vaginal canal. The chemical examiners developed a special test that could detect venom in these rags. There was little need for this test in England because this alleged form of crime really did not exist there circa 1900. There was no caste system or prohibitions on cow slaughter for most of the English population, and there were very few poisonous snakes. Legal historian Binyamin Blum makes this point in his ongoing research on forensic science across the British Empire. For instance, he is looking at the use of dog-generated evidence in Mandate Palestine, Kenya, and South Africa, and at footprint evidence in Ceylon.

One of the crucial features of the colonial legal system was the ‘othering’ of the native and ‘the rule of colonial difference’. And in your upcoming book, you talk about how ideas around ‘native mendacity’ were quite important to the colonial criminal law administration in India. Do you think there is a circularity to this logic, in that the colonial legal system created this stereotype of the untruthful ‘native’ and then used the same to introduce further difference in the way it treated them? Did the introduction of forensic evidence lead to further strengthening of these colonial stereotypes of Indians?

There was indeed a circular logic here. As I note in the book, the suspicion sharpened the detection, and then the detection in turn reinforced the suspicion. This is a phenomenon we see in the over-policing of people of colour in much of the Western world (for instance, relating to illicit drugs) and of religious minorities or those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy in South Asia today.

At the same time, it is also true that fear of the false was a driver for forensic developments in India, including the fine-tuning of the precipitin test for bloodstains and the detection of snake venom in rags found in bovine carcasses. The precipitin test was perfected due to the fear that animal blood was being planted to frame rivals in murder and rape cases. The invention of the venom test was driven by fear that cows were being poisoned by leather-working caste communities to make it look like the animals had died of illness (in order to use their skins for leather).

This is an uncomfortable realisation—that fear of the false could be both a self-perpetuating form of bias on the basis of race, caste, and culture and that it could spur on new developments in forensic analysis.

In the book, I also show that pioneering South Asian forensic experts like JP Modi and Chunilal Bose ultimately reshaped the explanatory framework for Indian forensic science by discarding the native mendacity stereotype.

One of the important arguments in your upcoming book is on the exemption granted to government lab experts from orally testifying in court and instead providing their reports with accompanying certificates as evidence. This is a compromise on the ‘right of confrontation’ (the right of the accused to cross examine witnesses and have evidence recorded in their presence) and which has never really become a constitutional right in India as it is in the US. Viewed in light of the way you have traced the origins of the right’s compromised form in India, would it not then also go against the ideas of uncovering ‘the truth’ that forensics claimed to uphold?

For most of the period covered by the book, this special rule was Section 510 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC, 1882). This unusual exemption from court appearances for government lab experts existed in India but not England and made it harder for judges to understand ambiguous or incomplete written reports. These certificates could be the crucial piece of evidence in death penalty cases like poison murder trials. The rule also made it harder to detect expert misconduct—and there were cases of suspected corruption among forensic experts in late colonial India. Fear of the false increased with respect to colonised people associated with crime, but it decreased with regard to state lab experts, making wrongful convictions more likely. Part 2 of my book looks at this kind of falsity—generated from within the criminal legal system itself—which undercut the kind of falsity featured in Part 1, namely falsity created by colonised tricksters planting poison or animal blood. The risk of falsity, laid out in Part 2, undermined the work being done to detect the falsity, as described in Part 1, and eroded the professed truth-revealing aim of colonial forensic science.

We have had a lot of recent discussion in India around decolonising criminal law. The three principal codes dealing with criminal adjudication have undergone changes and re-enactments. However, the new criminal laws seem to place the same, if not a heavier, reliance on scientific techniques of different kinds. It appears that the law still views scientific techniques as embodying a certain objectively truthful quality. In what ways do you think this might be a continuation of the systemic ways of thinking that the colonial legal system introduced? What would decolonisation of forensic science entail according to you?

‘Decolonising law’ gets proposed a lot, but often in a rather vague way. A specific way to decolonise criminal procedure, though, would be to change the way judges apply the rule formerly known as Section 510 of CrPC (1882), which later became Section 293 of CrPC (1973). I am making this argument in a spin-off article (currently in progress) to the book. This special rule existed in India but not in England, where it would not have been tolerated because it compromised the due process rights of criminal defendants. Since 2024, this special rule is now Section 329 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) of 2023, and the new version has expanded the pool of eligible experts. My proposal is that judges call these experts for cross-examination under oath, but via video-conferencing. The problem in the colonial period was that chemical examination reports were often cryptic or incomplete. Now, the problem is the opposite: the written report may provide a voluminous or technical ‘data dump’ that is impenetrable to scientific laypeople. The court still needs to understand the findings through real-time interactive communication with the expert, in other words. I acknowledge that video appearances are not as good as having experts give testimony in person, but video-conferencing would be better than the current system of using written reports alone. Given the huge backlogs, delays, and workload currently carried by the courts and forensic labs in India, video-conferencing may be a more practical proposal for reform than requiring an in-person appearance for every Section 329 expert.

About the Authors

Mitra Sharafi, Evjue-Bascom Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School (with History affiliation), University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.  She is a legal historian focusing on the South Asian region.

Kunal Ambasta, Assistant Professor of Law, National Law School of India University. His research areas include the criminal justice system, the law of evidence and proof, and the interface between law, sexuality, and gender identity.