Chapter 6 - Vacant Villages: Policing Riots in Colonial India

Summary

Abstract

This chapter looks at the policing of two caste-communities in twentieth-century South India to show how the modern state brought epistemic and legal violence to bear upon selected population groups. Stretched thin in the vast countryside, the colonial police force optimized its resources by categorizing its objects by caste, so that certain communities received extra state protection while others were criminalized and subject to frequent state force. While police violence is most visible in the state archive at the moment of spectacular violence—the riot and police fire, it impacted the everyday lives of subjects more subtly over an extended period, both before and after the riot. Finally, police violence was gendered. In the aftermath of riots, criminal procedure typically targeted men of specific communities, leaving entire villages bereft of its men for months on end, thereby enacting a different, archivally less visible, form of violence on women.

Keywords: Violence; Policing; Community; Caste; Gender

The modern nation-state emerged as among the foremost agents of violence in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds. Across historical accounts of colonial conquest, religious conflict, class unrest, and environmental ravage, the state's military and police apparatus are seen to play a key role in enacting and mediating violence. Moreover, since the modern state—whether colonial or independent, authoritarian or democratic—inevitably frames its violence as legal, a study of modern violence leads us to interrogating legal narratives. Indeed, an important endeavour in global legal studies scholarship has been to uncover the violence that legal interpretation unleashes—on individuals deemed guilty in a judicial court, on segments of the population deemed lesser citizens, or on entire territories deemed spaces of exception. A history of physical violence, then, also calls for a history of epistemic violence.

A critical component of the modern state's monopoly over legitimate violence was the formation of professionalized police forces that replaced less formal policing bodies earlier drawn from local communities—an extended process that occurred in Europe and its colonies from the eighteenth century onwards. Tasked with the mandate of maintaining social and economic order, policing relied on state knowledge that classified populations based on race, class, gender, and community to choose the objects of its coercive surveillance.