3 - Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation: India, 1858–1958

Summary

This chapter aims to provide a conceptual overview of the role of violence in the workings of the colonial state in British India, with reflections on how various modalities of violence constructed concepts of the nation, shaped anti-colonialism, hardened communal identities, and informed the constitution of the early independent Indian state. In this we bring theoretical interventions on violence and the state to the historiography of the Indian nationalist movement, with the aim to underscore the violence of colonialism and to de-centre the emphasis on non-violence in anti-colonialism. We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism’. Such a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was among other things marked by the extraordinary violence of partition. The independent state inherited many of the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it.