by Philip Dwyer
36.Hogg, ‘Penality and Modes of Regulating Indigenous Peoples’, 361.
37. An Act to amend ‘The Aboriginal Offenders Act 1883’ and to authorise the Whipping of Aboriginal native Offenders (55 Vict. no.18) 1892.
38.Western Australia Legislative Council Minutes, 2nd Session 1883, A10, State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA).
39. An Ordinance to provide for the Summary Trial and Punishment of Aboriginal native Offenders in certain cases (12 Vict. no 18) 1849, s. 2.
40. The Aboriginal Offenders Act (47 Vict. no 8) 1883.
41.For instance, The Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 11 October 1872, 2.
42.The Reverend John Brown Gribble was particularly vocal about colonial violence in the north-west and the abuse and exploitation of Indigenous people by settlers and police. His accusations circulated in the colonial press, were taken up by the Aborigines Protection Society in London, and were published in a pamphlet. J. B. Gribble, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, or Blacks and Whites in North-West Australia (Perth: Stirling Bros., 1886).
43. Despatches and Other Papers Relating to Transactions Arising out of the Homicide of and Other Alleged outrages on Aboriginal Natives (Perth: Government Printer, 1873); Legislative Council Instructions to and Reports from the Resident Magistrate Despatched by Direction of his Excellency on Special Duty to the Murchison and Gascoyne Districts (Fairbain Report) (Perth: Government Printer, 1882); Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council to Consider and Report upon Questions Connected with the Treatment and Condition of the Aboriginal Natives of the Colony (Perth: Government Printer, 1885); ‘Correspondence on the Gribble Case, 1884–1887’, Acc 388, AN1/1, Box 1, items 3–32, SROWA; Report of the Royal Commission of the Condition of the Natives (Roth Report) (Perth: Government Printer, 1905).
44.For instance, ‘Papers respecting the treatment of aboriginal natives in Western Australia’, Acc 527, 1886/1849, SROWA.
45.Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘“Keep the Magistrates Straight”: Magistrates and Aboriginal “Management” on Australia’s North-West Frontiers, 1883–1905’, Aboriginal History 38 (2014), 21.
46.For instance, ‘Native Depredations in the Northern Districts’, Western Mail, 26 December 1891, 15.
47. The Daily News, 1 February 1892, 2.
48.Western Australian Parliamentary Debates, 29 January 1892, cited in Finnane, Punishment in Australian Society, 116.
49. Western Mail, 6 February 1892, 10.
50.‘The Native Outbreak at the Kimberley’, Inquirer and Commercial News, 6 October 1893, 4.
51. Western Mail, 21 September 1901.
52.Charles Straker to the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Board, 30 November 1892, Acc 945, 92/726, SROWA.
53.A later police report cites the date of Anderson’s release from Fremantle goal as 10 February 1893. Acc 430, 1926/5016, SROWA.
54.For instance, Western Australian 5 January 1898.
55.Memorandum by the Attorney General, 29 June 1892, The West Australian 5 July 1892.
56.For instance, ‘Ill-treating a Native: A Magistrate Fined’, Western Mail, 10 February 1899.
57.‘The Nor’-West Blacks’, Kalgoorlie Miner, 31 July 1901, 2.
58.‘Slavery in WA’, Sunday Times, 24 May 1903, 11.
59.‘The Aborigines Protection Act, Better Known as the Slavery Law of WA’, Western Australian Sunday Times, 23 September 1900, 11; Evening News, 10 January 1898, 3.
60.Commonwealth of Australia, Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, 21–23 April 1937 (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937), 35.
61.For reportage on mid twentieth-century cases relating to Australia, Jamaica, New Guinea, Nairobi and South Africa see instance, News, 11 May 1933, Daily Standard 25 October 1935, Tribune, 14 May 1946, 2; Examiner, 3 October 1953, 3; The Argus, 14 December 1955.
62.Hogg, ‘Penality and Modes of Regulating Indigenous Peoples’, 361.
© The Author(s) 2018
Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds.)Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern WorldCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62923-0_7
Seeing like a Policeman: Everyday Violence in British India, c. 1900–1950
Radha Kumar1
(1)Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
Radha Kumar
Email: [email protected]
Madras Presidency, sprawled across the southern end of peninsular India , comprised around two dozen districts and occupied an area of 141,189 square miles. 1 The Government of Madras administered this vast southern province from its capital at Fort St. George, located in the port town of Madras. The provincial police force was also headquartered in Madras, in a beautiful neoclassical building that overlooked the calm waters of the Bay of Bengal. The building’s occupants, however, looked away from the sea, towards the province’s hinterlands. Theirs was the task to supervise the working of the district police, to ensure that law was enforced and order maintained across the province. But what really could they see of rural Madras from this distant, urban perch? How did a force of 30,000 manage a population of 40 million? 2 One way the police coped with the numerical disparity and geographical spread they faced was by reacting rather than preventing—specifically, by responding to ‘trouble’ quickly, with spectacular use of violence. In twentieth-century Madras Presidency, armed police units were ‘quickly sent to deal with any variety of disturbance or resistance to colonial control—a religious riot one day, perhaps, a strike in a factory the next, a rural fracas the day after.’ 3 Police firings were strikingly visible expressions of colonial authority. Moreover, they made their way into governmental records as a matter of course. Understandably, then, this overtly violent aspect of police authority has been fairly widely studied. 4
This chapter argues that police encounter with rural populations was, however, not limited to such moments of sudden and spectacular violence. A decrepit building that served as the police station in one small town; a dusty board announcing the station’s presence in another; a sandal-shod, khaki-clad constable trudging his way to a distant village. Somewhat dull, seemingly trivial—these actions, persons, and sites enabled inhabitants of the Tamil countryside to experience police authority in very different ways from that described above. Less bloody, more frequent. And, consequently, as a less discordant, more proximate presence that lodged itself neatly in the rural landscape. In particular, this chapter examines the police beat to argue that colonial policemen acted as agents of state surveillance and coercion at the level of the quotidian. In this incarnation, the colonial police not only represented an alien and repressive state, in addition, they also represented a state that slid into the rhythms of everyday life. Of course, policemen in this milder incarnation were not an entirely benign presence, but rather always carried the threat of violence. I argue, therefore, that the police beat brought colonial subjects under the gaze of the state and made them vulnerable to the force of its law.
Having said that, perennial financial constraints meant that maintaining a routine police presence in the vast countryside was a very real challenge for the colonial government. In twentieth-century rural India , the police force was thin relative to the area and population it needed to manage, as historians have demonstrated for Madras and Bombay Presidencies. 5 In the southern, Tamil-speaking districts of Madurai, Tirunelveli, and Ramanathapuram in Madras Presidency, which this chapter studies, there was a police station for approximately every 100 square miles in the first half of the twentieth century. In the countryside, this ratio was even smaller, shrinking to one station for every 150 square miles or so. 6 Each district maintained a force of around 900 policemen, resulting in a ratio of one policeman per 5 square miles and per 2000 people. 7 I propose that their lack of numbers notwithstanding, the colonial police did exercise routine authority in southern Madras Presidency by resorting to a number of measures, such as the incorporation of village
officials into police bureaucratic functioning and a carefully planned allocation of police resources that ensured optimal monitoring of the colonial economy.
The colonial police were therefore not only a coercive apparatus established to secure the British Raj, they were also integral to the governmentalization of the state, and were strategically deployed to enable the expansion of settled agriculture, the development of a productive labour force, and the circulation of people and commodities. To this end, the Madras police were not evenly distributed across the province, contrary to their implicit claim in certain records—for instance the annual administrative reports submitted by the department to the provincial government. This report unfailingly opened with a map displaying the number of ‘serious offences against person and property’ that had occurred in each district of Madras Presidency that year. These statistics were displayed through use of patterned symbols—darker, denser images for increasing levels of crime, offering its reader an immediate grasp of the varying occurrence of crime across the Presidency. The map represented Madras Presidency as a homogenous and bounded space where law was administered uniformly. 8 Furthermore, in its positivist projection of crime, the map suggests perfect police visibility into this political entity. Of course, in practice, police gaze was limited; the arm of the state and its law did not extend evenly across the territory. Rather, a ‘narrowing of vision’ was required to make the countryside legible to the colonial state. 9 This was provided by the imperial political economy, which, as Manu Goswami has shown, ‘shaped the reconfiguration of the relationship between state and space in colonial India ,’ especially in the post-1857 years. 10 Police records from Madras Presidency show evidence of extraordinarily detailed planning that went towards determining the location of station houses across the province, so that the rhythms of a colonial economy that relied on agriculture and trade continued undisturbed.
Colonial policemen did not operate only in their station houses; they also monitored the subject population on carefully charted beats whose route and frequency could be changed periodically. The beat was critical in determining where exactly the police would be present, how often, and in what numbers. Further, it enabled the police gaze to fall upon a far wider area than would have been possible from just the police station. Drawing on a range of sources—from richly detailed cartographic and narrative resource allocation plans produced by senior, European, police officials to routine, and previously unexplored, notes maintained by native inspectors at local stations—this chapter examines the police beat in the Tamil countryside in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that policemen on the beat acted, first, as agents of state surveillance and, second, as agents of routine state violence. In the pages that follow, I study the quotidian practices of beat policemen (who were inevitably natives)—what they wrote, whom they watched, where they walked. An examination of these routine practices reveals the articulation of colonial governmentality in the documentary and embodied practices of lower-level state functionaries.
In examining everyday forms of state coercion and surveillance , and the knowledge-production practices that underlay these, this essay aligns itself with two strands of the scholarship on colonial power and governmentality: (1) the imbrication of colonial knowledge in the exercise of colonial authority; and (2) the violence inherent in colonial rule. Historians and anthropologists of modern India , most notably Bernard Cohn, have examined how the production of colonial knowledge objectified India, ‘coding…India in ways that rendered it increasingly available for colonization.’ 11 Importantly, colonial knowledge mapped India in terms of communities defined by caste and religious identity, rather than as a nation of (bourgeois) individuals. 12 In the following pages, I show that policing too drew on colonial knowledge that mapped the population as thrifty and labouring castes, criminal castes, litigious castes, and so forth. Policemen used this knowledge on the beat so that certain communities were policed more closely and with greater violence than were others.
Colonial governmentality in India relied not only on the production of colonial knowledge, it also required the exercise of violence. 13 Scholars of colonialism have challenged the liberal claims of nineteenth-century empire to highlight the constant tension between rule of law and rule of force in the exercise of imperial authority. Partha Chatterjee asserts that although introducing modern law to an ostensibly lawless nation was central to legitimizing British presence in India , there were racial limits to the rule of law, and the liberal project was always limited by the need to maintain difference between the colonizer and the colonized. 14 Nasser Hussain characterizes the colonial condition as one of ‘permanent exception’ where the British government always had the option of suspending normal law and invoking the state of exception in order to maintain political power. 15 This essay also foregrounds the violence inherent in colonial rule, but argues somewhat differently that state violence in colonial India was not only witnessed when the law was suspended or subverted, but rather was part of the very process of law enforcement. State coercion was continuous and subtle, and woven into the warp and weft of everyday life in the form of policing.
In order to retrieve the everyday role of the beat policeman in colonial governance, I juxtapose planning documents produced by senior police officials with surveillance registers maintained by inspectors at local police stations. In using these records, I go beyond the more commonly used sources in South Asian legal historiography, which emphasize legislation and litigation over the moment of law enforcement. Furthermore, police surveillance registers are kept permanently at police stations and do not make their way to an official archive—hence, they are not easily accessible either to the public or to scholars. I gained access to station records dating from the 1930s at six police stations in Tirunelveli district and two stations in Ramanathapuram district (present-day Virudhunagar district). The Tirunelveli records, which I use for this essay, cover about 50 villages and several dozen hamlets, and provide a rare glimpse into police practice at the most locally documented level.
Mapping Communities
Going on beats to monitor suspect populations was one of the principal functions of constables, whose other tasks included patrolling high-roads, guarding the treasury and sub-jail, writing journal entries, and escorting prisoners. Around a third of constables in the southern districts of Madras Presidency were staffed specifically for beat duty. 16 The beat was important enough that it informed the allocation of police resources—the number of criminal suspects requiring surveillance in different villages was frequently factored in while planning the location and staffing of stations. Asking for the establishment of an outpost to Munnirpallam station in Tirunelveli, police planners asserted that crime in the locality was fairly heavy and that ‘some eight surveillance K.D.’s (Known Depredators) who could not, except with difficulty, be properly checked from Munnirpallam, reside in the adjoining villages.’ 17 In addition, police jurisdictions were frequently realigned to make the beat less arduous. In 1938, for instance, Kuliyaneri and Anaikulam villages, 12 miles away from Kadayanallur station and connected only by a cart-track impossible to traverse during the rains, were reallocated to a different station, only 6 miles from the villages. 18 Likewise, Vagaikulam outpost, 6.5 miles on an inaccessible route from Tattaparai station, was transferred to a different, more accessible, station. 19 The term ‘itineration’ featured prominently in all planning documents, and some planning maps even depicted the roads and cross-country paths to be taken from the station house to various villages to be covered on the beat.
Strictly speaking, the Second National Police Commission of 1902 had abolished the village beat, having assessed the previous policy wherein constables undertook beats to all villages as impractical and ineffective. Instead, in an effort to target police resources to the ‘really dangerous,’ the Commission recommended that constables now only undertake beats to specific places, at specific times: villages whose authorities were untrustworthy; villages wher
e especially ‘dangerous criminals, or gangs’ resided; and ‘camping grounds, serais, ferries and all places of public resort.’ 20 In this targeted effort at surveillance , colonial knowledge that classified and objectified the subject population—often based on community—played a key role. Police inspectors maintained a range of information pertaining to the subject population in their station records: notes on each village in their station jurisdiction, lists of all suspected criminals and their movements, as well as more detailed information on particular caste-communities that were seen as requiring extra surveillance . In this section, I examine the documentary practices of the station policeman that guided him on his beat and simultaneously enabled the reproduction of knowledge of community and criminality.
By the late-nineteenth century, the notion that certain communities were inherently criminal (by virtue of training or heredity) had gained currency in colonial governance, and was crystallized with the passing of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 (henceforth ‘CTA’). 21 The Act attributed criminality at the level of the community, for simply belonging to it, rather than at the level of an individual for a particular crime. The objects of criminal tribe legislation were often vagrant communities that did not practice settled agriculture. The legislation, by empowering the state to restrict criminal tribe members’ movements and allot them agricultural land or an alternative livelihood, cultivated labouring subjects; its implementation therefore contributed to the functioning of the colonial economy. In the southern Tamil countryside, Maravars, Kallars, and Koravars were among the principal castes declared criminal. One reason for Maravars being notified under the CTA was that they participated in a system of informal village policing, called kaval, criminalized by the colonial government since the early-nineteenth century. 22 This knowledge of kaval as criminal, and kavalgars (the participants) as criminals, was created and perpetuated through colonial anthropology and frequent governmental directives aimed at eradicating the system. 23 At the level of police practice, kavalgars inevitably found their way into police registers as criminal suspects. Station houses were established, and surveillance beats laid out, to police kavalgars in particular, and Maravars in general. In addition, most police stations that I visited had on their files something called a ‘Marava Form.’ This form very likely was restricted to police stations within Tirunelveli and Ramanathapuram districts, where Maravars were a numerically dominant caste. It was probably used for around three decades (1920s–1940s), when the CTA was in force in Madras Presidency. It thus captures a very historically specific enactment of the broader discourse on criminal castes.
