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Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India
A fascinating account of the invention of fingerprinting in colonial India and the story of how the technique was exported back to Victorian England. Opening with the first case in a British criminal court to use the radical new technique of fingerprinting to identify the perpetrators of crime in 1902 this riveting book takes us back to the origins of fingerprinting in India. Despite many books on the subject of fingerprints in general, none have looked closely at the fact that this standard tool of forensic science was born in India during the Raj. As the author points out, with the exception of curry there is not one other instance of something so fundamental to British life being imported fully-formed from the Empire and then being tailored to fit conditions at home. Based on original and hitherto unpublished research Imprint of the Raj gives a unique insight into our colonial past and offers a vivid account of this extraordinary and largely ignored story. Chandak Sengoopta is the Wellcome Research Lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His first academic book, Otto Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna was published by the, University of Chicago Press in 2000. Imprint of the Raj is his first book for the general reader.
234 pages, Hardcover
First published February 21, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 25, 2019
A fun pop-science, pop-history survey of the use of finger-printing in government, which uses the alternative techniques, sites, and controversies very effectively to create a quick, informative read. The last third, where the author touches on the controversies of credibility (judges arguing about exert witnesses, juries overruling experts and then being overruled by judges, etc) were the most interesting for me, but even the rest of the book, while not particularly analytic, has cool enough material (who doesn't love crime?) to hold its own.
August 25, 2025
This tome is one of those rare histories where a seemingly narrow subject opens into vast questions about empire, science, and the very meaning of identity.
Finished this morning, the book left me with a curious sensation: the way a fingerprint, at once minuscule and unique, can also become an emblem of power structures stretching across centuries and continents.
Sengoopta is meticulous in showing how fingerprinting emerged less from the eureka moment of a lone genius and more from the messy entanglement of colonial bureaucracy, anxieties about fraud, and a desire to “scientifically” know and classify Indian subjects. The act of pressing an inked finger onto paper becomes, in his telling, not just a bureaucratic tool but a deeply political act.
Compared to other histories of forensic science, Sengoopta’s work feels strikingly specific in its focus yet global in implication.
Jay D. Aronson’s Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling (2007), for instance, takes us into late 20th-century courtrooms where DNA evidence was transforming notions of truth and justice.
While Aronson emphasises the legal controversies and the scientific debates about reliability, Sengoopta’s narrative is rooted in the imperial project itself: how governance in colonial India actively shaped what counted as “reliable” identification in the first place. In this sense, fingerprinting is less about science catching up with truth and more about science serving the needs of rule.
Similarly, Alison Bashford’s Imperial Hygiene (2004) comes to mind as a companion text—another exploration of how the empire used biological and bodily markers to surveil, categorise, and control populations. Bashford deals with sanitation and segregation, while Sengoopta looks at fingertips, but both reveal the same dynamic: the colonial body rendered into data.
Where Bashford shows us the body as a site of contagion and purity, Sengoopta presents the body as a site of authenticity and deception. Together, these works illustrate how colonial science was never disinterested but always already implicated in the maintenance of order.
One of the book’s most compelling contributions is the recovery of Indian figures like Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, whose intellectual labour was instrumental to Edward Henry’s fingerprint classification system.
Reading this after having browsed Simon A. Cole’s Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (2001), the contrast is sharp. Cole, though insightful on the broader global trajectory, remains somewhat Eurocentric, whereas Sengoopta insists on India as the crucible of innovation.
It is in Bengal’s offices and prisons, not merely London’s laboratories, that fingerprinting was born. In highlighting this, Sengoopta reminds us of how “universal” science often has parochial origins, coloured by race, empire, and ideology.
What lingers most after finishing the book is how profoundly it reshapes the notion of identity. Before fingerprints, identity in India was enmeshed in caste, kinship, land, and community testimony.
Afterward, identity could be distilled to the whorls and ridges on skin, indifferent to reputation or social networks. It’s a transition that resonates with our own moment of biometrics, Aadhaar databases, and genetic surveillance.
Reading Sengoopta after works like Richard Saferstein’s textbooks on forensic science, which tend to present technologies as neat, objective, and value-free, you realise just how misleading such neutrality is. Technologies of identification are never innocent; they bear the imprints of the societies that birthed them.
By the final chapter, one feels that Sengoopta has achieved something more than a history of fingerprinting. He has crafted a genealogy of how science entwines with power, how a ridge of skin can mirror the architecture of empire.
In this way, Imprint of the Raj stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Cole, Aronson, and Bashford, while also carving its own distinct path by rooting the narrative in the Indian colonial archive.
It’s a reminder that every “objective” forensic method has a story, and often that story begins in the shadows of domination.
Finished this morning, the book left me with a curious sensation: the way a fingerprint, at once minuscule and unique, can also become an emblem of power structures stretching across centuries and continents.
Sengoopta is meticulous in showing how fingerprinting emerged less from the eureka moment of a lone genius and more from the messy entanglement of colonial bureaucracy, anxieties about fraud, and a desire to “scientifically” know and classify Indian subjects. The act of pressing an inked finger onto paper becomes, in his telling, not just a bureaucratic tool but a deeply political act.
Compared to other histories of forensic science, Sengoopta’s work feels strikingly specific in its focus yet global in implication.
Jay D. Aronson’s Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling (2007), for instance, takes us into late 20th-century courtrooms where DNA evidence was transforming notions of truth and justice.
While Aronson emphasises the legal controversies and the scientific debates about reliability, Sengoopta’s narrative is rooted in the imperial project itself: how governance in colonial India actively shaped what counted as “reliable” identification in the first place. In this sense, fingerprinting is less about science catching up with truth and more about science serving the needs of rule.
Similarly, Alison Bashford’s Imperial Hygiene (2004) comes to mind as a companion text—another exploration of how the empire used biological and bodily markers to surveil, categorise, and control populations. Bashford deals with sanitation and segregation, while Sengoopta looks at fingertips, but both reveal the same dynamic: the colonial body rendered into data.
Where Bashford shows us the body as a site of contagion and purity, Sengoopta presents the body as a site of authenticity and deception. Together, these works illustrate how colonial science was never disinterested but always already implicated in the maintenance of order.
One of the book’s most compelling contributions is the recovery of Indian figures like Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, whose intellectual labour was instrumental to Edward Henry’s fingerprint classification system.
Reading this after having browsed Simon A. Cole’s Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (2001), the contrast is sharp. Cole, though insightful on the broader global trajectory, remains somewhat Eurocentric, whereas Sengoopta insists on India as the crucible of innovation.
It is in Bengal’s offices and prisons, not merely London’s laboratories, that fingerprinting was born. In highlighting this, Sengoopta reminds us of how “universal” science often has parochial origins, coloured by race, empire, and ideology.
What lingers most after finishing the book is how profoundly it reshapes the notion of identity. Before fingerprints, identity in India was enmeshed in caste, kinship, land, and community testimony.
Afterward, identity could be distilled to the whorls and ridges on skin, indifferent to reputation or social networks. It’s a transition that resonates with our own moment of biometrics, Aadhaar databases, and genetic surveillance.
Reading Sengoopta after works like Richard Saferstein’s textbooks on forensic science, which tend to present technologies as neat, objective, and value-free, you realise just how misleading such neutrality is. Technologies of identification are never innocent; they bear the imprints of the societies that birthed them.
By the final chapter, one feels that Sengoopta has achieved something more than a history of fingerprinting. He has crafted a genealogy of how science entwines with power, how a ridge of skin can mirror the architecture of empire.
In this way, Imprint of the Raj stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Cole, Aronson, and Bashford, while also carving its own distinct path by rooting the narrative in the Indian colonial archive.
It’s a reminder that every “objective” forensic method has a story, and often that story begins in the shadows of domination.
August 13, 2011
Good description of how formal use of fingerprinting arose, how it came to be used predominately for identification and some speculation on the demise of personal rights due to the rise of biometrics.
August 23, 2025
A gem of a study. I had no idea that fingerprinting as a police method is so much historically connected to British colonial practices in India. Also, the parts of the book on indigo cultivation were an additional gem within this gem.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews