Exploring violent confrontation between the state and the
population in colonial and postcolonial India, this book is both a
study of the many techniques of colonial coercion and state
violence and a cultural history of the different ways in which
Indians imbued practices of punishment with their own meanings and
reinterpreted acts of state violence in their own political
campaigns.
This work examines state violence from a historical perspective,
expanding the study of punishment beyond the prison by
investigating the interplay between imprisonment, corporal
punishment, collective fines and state violence. It provides a
fresh look at seminal events in the history of mid-twentieth
century India, such as the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, the
non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements, the Quit India
campaign, and the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1930s and 1940s. The
book extends its analysis into the postcolonial period by
considering the ways in which partition and then the struggle
against a communist insurgency reshaped practices of punishment and
state violence in the first decade after independence. Ultimately,
this research challenges prevailing conceptions of the nature of
the state in colonial and postcolonial India, which have tended to
assume that the state had the ambition and the ability to use the
police, military and bureaucracy to dominate the population at
will. It argues, on the contrary, that the state in
twentieth-century India tended to be self-limiting, vulnerable, and
replete with tensions.
Relevant to those interested in contemporary India and the
history of empire and decolonisation, this work provides a new
framework for the study of state violence which will be invaluable
to scholars of South Asian studies; violence, crime and punishment;
and colonial and postcolonial history.
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