On 1 July 2024, India acquired three new criminal laws. The most prominent of them, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, replaced the Indian Penal Code, which had stood in amended form since 1860.

What caught my attention was the language surrounding the change. The old laws were described as colonial. The new ones were presented as a step towards removing the last traces of that inheritance. After more than seventy-five years of independence, India was finally replacing a criminal code drafted under British rule.

I liked the ambition. Then I reached the final section of the new law.

Section 358 is titled “Repeal and savings.” Its first sentence is decisive: the Indian Penal Code is repealed. The clauses that follow are quieter. Earlier offences, penalties, investigations and proceedings can continue under the old code. Actions already taken are carried into the new system. The break is real, but it is not clean.

That section stayed with me because it describes more than a legal transition. It describes the strange afterlife of empire.

The British Empire no longer rules India. This is not an argument that independence was somehow incomplete or imaginary. India writes its own laws, elects its own governments and can discard institutions that Britain left behind. But political authority can end on one date while habits, procedures and systems continue for generations.

The flag changes first. The files take longer.

The Indian Penal Code began with the First Law Commission under Thomas Macaulay. The commission produced its draft in 1837, and the code was enacted in 1860. It survived the Raj, independence and Partition, the adoption of the Constitution, wars, elections, liberalisation and decades of argument about what the republic should become.

It did not survive unchanged. Indian legislators amended it. Indian judges interpreted it. Indian citizens challenged it. Provisions were removed, narrowed or made unenforceable. By 2024, the code operating in India was not simply a Victorian document preserved under glass. It had accumulated more than a century and a half of Indian law around it.

That is what makes institutional inheritance difficult to talk about. If an institution began under foreign rule, does its origin permanently define it? If later generations alter it, use it and sometimes defend it, when does an imposed system become their own?

I keep arriving at the same unsatisfying answer: there is no single moment.

I am writing this essay in English. No British official instructed me to do that. I chose English because it lets me communicate with readers across India and outside it. It is useful to me. It is also impossible to pretend that the range of choices available to me appeared without history.

English is embedded in Indian higher education, technology, commerce, government and law. Article 348 of the Constitution provides for English in the Supreme Court and High Courts, as well as in authoritative texts of legislation, subject to the Constitution’s provisions and permitted exceptions. The language arrived with power, but Indians did not remain passive users of it. We made it carry arguments against the empire that spread it. We used it to write a Constitution, build companies, make films, publish novels and disagree with one another.

Calling English merely a colonial imposition misses that second history. Calling it a neutral global language misses the first.

Both are true.

The same tension appears in the new criminal code. The government described the three laws as a departure from a system created to serve colonial interests. There are genuine changes. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita introduces community service as a punishment for some offences and adds provisions concerning organised crime and terrorism. It reorganises offences and removes or replaces some older provisions.

Yet an independent legislative analysis found that the new code retains most offences from the Indian Penal Code. That does not by itself make the reform false. Murder did not need to become legal for India to prove it was independent. Theft did not become colonial simply because it appeared in a colonial code.

The real question is not how many section numbers changed. It is what kind of relationship the law creates between the state and the person standing before it.

A criminal code is experienced in police stations, courtrooms, prisons and years spent waiting for a hearing. Its character depends on who can be arrested, how power is supervised, whether bail is accessible, how evidence is treated and whether the poorest person can defend himself against the state. A law can have an Indian name and still be used in an authoritarian way. A law with a colonial origin can be interpreted under a democratic Constitution and constrained by rights that its original authors never intended.

Names matter. Origins matter too. Neither tells the whole story.

When people argue about colonial legacies, the conversation often collapses into two positions. One side treats every inherited institution as contaminated. The other points to railways, courts or English and asks whether colonialism should be thanked for them.

I do not find either position convincing.

An institution can be useful now and still have been created through unjust power. Later usefulness does not compensate for conquest. At the same time, a society that inherits something is not condemned to repeat its original purpose forever. People can appropriate a language, rewrite a law and turn an administrative tool towards ends its creators would have opposed.

But appropriation should not become an excuse for avoiding scrutiny. Saying “we have made it our own” is meaningful only if citizens are allowed to ask what exactly has been made ours: the language, the procedure, the concentration of authority, the suspicion of dissent, or all of them together.

This is why I think empire often survives as background noise. Its most visible symbols disappear. The red portions vanish from the map. Governors leave their residences. Streets are renamed. After that, what remains becomes ordinary: a form to be completed, a boundary to be crossed, a language associated with opportunity, a rule whose origin nobody needs to remember in order to obey it.

Background noise is easy to ignore precisely because life has adjusted to it.

Decolonisation cannot mean returning to a world untouched by Britain. That world no longer exists. History is not a stain that can be scrubbed away until a country recovers some perfectly original condition. The people living in former colonies have already spent generations adapting what was inherited, abandoning parts of it and adding institutions of their own.

The more useful question is whether an inherited system deserves to continue.

Who benefits from it now? Whose power does it protect? Can it be justified without appealing to habit? Can citizens change it? These questions do not produce the drama of lowering a flag or repealing a famous code. They are slower, and they have to be asked repeatedly.

I return to Section 358. One sentence repeals the Indian Penal Code. The rest explains what the repeal cannot erase. Earlier cases still have to be tried. Earlier actions still have consequences. Judges and lawyers do not forget more than a century of jurisprudence because the statute book has a new title.

That continuity may be necessary. It is also a reminder that independence is not demonstrated by the purity of a break. It is demonstrated by what a country chooses to do with the power it inherited.

The flag came down in 1947. The harder work is quieter and still unfinished: deciding what we have made our own, what we should transform, and what no republic should continue to defend.

Sources and Further Reading