MUMBAI: In June 1844, the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, which would later become the Times of India, carried a report on unrest in Lahore. Among the many incidents listed was one of a Sikh soldier who had apparently procured two women, one the widow of a Brahmin and the other that of a Baniya.

After being brought before a native judge, the soldier was simply sent back to duty, but the Brahmin woman was sentenced to imprisonment and the other woman “to have her head shaved, her face blackened and to be paraded through the streets of the city.” As the newspaper noted a few months later in a case from Sind involving a “gentleman thief,” this was an old Indian mode of punishment, with the added detail that the parading was usually done with the person facing backwards on a donkey.

But that earlier report captures many features of face-blackening, which is seeing a resurgence under the Shiv Sena. Its performative nature, for example, where parading the victim is more important that any real attempt at justice. Or how it penalises weaker parties more, with the lower-caste woman getting by far the worse punishment. But above all, its basic, barbaric exultation of injustice where the apparent perpetrator, the soldier, escaped censure, while the women who were the victims were punished and one in such a traumatising, almost dehumanising way.

This is always the way with vigilante justice, which is why no civilised society allows it, instead insisting on formal judges and legal procedures — however frustrating they might seem to those who claim to suffer from crimes — rather than letting mobs take over. Yet justifications for such lawlessness always seem to come easily: that the ‘crime’ was so awful it demanded immediate redressal, that the mob is a crude kind of democracy, that justice delayed is justice denied and this is, at least, quick.

Add to this a particular justification for practices of public shaming like face blackening — that it is not, physically at least, so bad. When Shiv Sena spokesman dismissed the face blackening of Sudheendra Kulkarni as “a very mild form of democratic protest,” you could hear his implication that they could easily have done far worse. This was just paint, which washes off, so what was the problem? Why, they could even have given him a jolly donkey ride, if donkeys were easily found in Mumbai.

You can hear this tone of aggrieved justification, vindictive pleasure at the action and dismissal of the victim’s feelings in such incidents through history. While parties founded on perpetual protest like the Sena or the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, another fervent fan of face blackening, are most associated with the practice, in fact its use is widespread and across ideologies.

In 1991, a group of women’s organisations blackened the face of a lawyer who had apparently made sexist statements in the course of a high-profile case. In 1992, it was a group of Congress workers in Kalyan who blackened the face of a Catholic school principal for not giving their children admission. In 2005, it was Bollywood actor Shakti Kapoor who got his face blackened by some unnamed activists who had problems with his sleazy appearance in a TV sting operation.

While the roots of the practice in India might be rural, as the many cases involving Dalits in villages show, it has taken on something of an association with educational and clerical demands, perhaps because of the easy availability of ink in such situations. It is notable that the Shiv Sainiks who attacked Kulkarni seem to have used black oil paint perhaps since ink is no longer so easily available; an increasingly digital world has evidently forced some changes in face blackening.

Face blackening is not just an Indian practice and in its appearances across the world many similar elements can be found. In France, for example, the end of World War II saw victors turning vigilantes. Women accused of sleeping with German soldiers had their heads tonsured and were paraded marked with tar or, even more mockingly, with lipstick. Many of the women had been raped by Germans, or had cohabited simply to avoid starvation for their families, but this didn’t matter to the mobs — often made up of people with their own unsavoury histories to hide and the knowledge that publicly going after someone weaker was a good way to cover this up.

But the best known example of public humiliation involving blackening people was the upsurge in tarring and feathering that came with the American Revolution. Humiliating someone by first covering them with sticky tar, and then throwing on feathers to dehumanise the person even further is a practice that has been traced all the way back to 1189, when Richard I of England, the famous crusading king, decreed that crusaders found stealing were “to have boiling Pitch dropped upon their Crowns and after having Cushion-Feathers stuck upon the Pitch, they were to be set on shore, in that figure…”

Pitch was a sticky substance derived from pine drives used to caulk ships and prevent leakages. It was molten at lower temperatures than mineral tar, so some have pointed out that it would not have hurt as much on application. But as the historian Benjamin Irvin, who has made a particular study of the subject, notes, it was so tenaciously sticky that removing it was extremely painful: “Most victims lost a good deal of body hair… (in one particularly brutal case) as the tar was being removed, strips of dead skin were torn off with it.”

Feathers were commonly used in those days before cotton, coir or foam to stuff mattresses and pillows. The fact that it was women who usually worked with them could be one indication that these protests often involved women, as well as being directed at them — again, an indication of the ‘justification’ of this as a less-violent protest. Anything more violent would presumably have been unsuitable for women to watch, but here they could, and did, participate in full.

After its 12th century origins, references to tarring and feathering are rare, until suddenly they increase in 18th century America. It isn’t clear who came up with the idea in its first recorded comeback in America in 1766 in Virginia, but the idea caught on fast. Boston acquired the reputation of being the “seminary of the art,” due to its combination of being a port city and also the centre for British customs officials, who were the main target of the rebellion that started as a protest against taxes imposed by Britain to pay for the costs of the Seven Years’ War.

It was a successful strategy. Tarring and feathering of tax officers resulted in plunging tax collection. Irvin notes how politicians in London, in words that sound like statements made about the Shiv Sena, deplored how Americans “instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering.” The vividly visual practice, which was depicted in many cartoons and illustrations, had a vital role in bringing the colonies into war with Britain and, as such, acquired a patriotic reputation on the lines of what the Sena is claiming for its own efforts.

The problem was that the practice didn’t stop with Independence. Politicians who had supported tarring and feathering against the British found that the mob was equally happy to use it against them, now that they were in charge. Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual leaders of the Revolution, called for the practice to stop, but it was too late. Tarring and feathering had become an established part of American life, and those who did it could cite its Revolutionary use as patriotic justification.

Tarring and feathering did die out in time, though occasional uses kept coming up. It was used in the early 20th century against labour activists and then by white supremacists against supporters of civil rights for black people. The best-known recent use though was not in the US, but back across the Atlantic, in Northern Ireland in 2007. An alleged drug dealer was brutally tarred and feathered, to the point of looking barely human.

And in media interviews the perpetrators, while remaining anonymous, were quite unrepentant. He got what was coming to him, they said, and they suggested they could have done worse. It was how this community – which they didn’t need to specify included members of Northern Ireland’s terrorist groups – dealt with things, and anyone who lived there had to behave according to their rules. What rules they didn’t specify. Anyone who needed to know could try asking and risk getting a blackened face.