Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World
Page 20
Conclusion
Interventions by the police to defuse societal tension were not always successful, and cases of failure are more easily found in the government archive. For instance, the provincial government’s Fortnightly Report from 1930 mentions that Tiruchuli ‘was the scene of a small riot between caste Hindus and ‘untouchables’ arising out of a private quarrel. The affair was not serious, although the police had to open fire, and order was quickly restored.’ 63 Such reports, which show police intervention once a conflict had erupted, suggest at first glance that the police were distanced from society and unaware of its fault lines. However, a closer reading of the pre-history of such conflicts sometimes reveals scattered references in the governmental archive itself to the disciplining attempts made by the police to contain the dispute. 64 In addition, the evidence from police station records suggests that the police surveillance of villages did in fact happen regularly, and was influential in checking caste conflict, especially in contexts where lower-caste groups were not politicized. I suggest, therefore, that archival records of violent caste conflicts may be read as much as an indication of the heightened political mobilization of the conflicting parties, as of police absence. Lower castes usually entered the government records only when they were strong enough to resist caste authority.
Through a close look at the police beat in the Tamil districts of southern India in the first half of the twentieth century, I have argued in this chapter that the colonial police were not an entity distant from rural society, appearing only at moments of violent protests. Rather, they held a widespread and regular, albeit selective, presence in the Tamil countryside. Contrary to the ideal of a force uniformly spread across the Tamil landscape, the colonial police monitored certain places and certain people more than they did others. Rural police stations covered areas ranging from 75 square miles to 200 square miles. 65 Beats to villages that had registered criminals, however few in number, were prioritized over those that did not. Inhabitants of the colonial countryside were, then, not uniformly objects of coercive state authority. Drawing on colonial knowledge which objectified community, privileged property, and criminalized vagrancy, police practices redirected the constable’s gaze (and stave) towards ‘dangerous’ spaces and ‘criminal’ subjects. The state’s gaze was not a panoptic one, all-seeing and steadfast. Rather, it was moving and rhythmic, directed along the beat, to target specified individuals and discipline specific activities, with coercion . This routinized and well-calibrated violence was directed towards refashioning rural society and maintaining the rhythm of a colonial social order that depended on agriculture and trade.
Notes
1.Charles Benson, Statistical Atlas of the Madras Presidency, 1895, 1. Maps29c28, British Library, London. (Does not include area of princely states within the Presidency’s borders.)
2.Population figures are from the 1921 Census of India , and include the population of princely states. Police force figures are broadly for the first half of the twentieth century, though numbers increased substantially, to over 40,000, with the outbreak of the Second World War.
3.David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 9.
4.The classic work on the Madras police is David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947.
5.Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India,’ Modern Asian Studies, 41:3 (2007), 441–470.
6.As of 1925, Tirunelveli district had 877 policemen spread over 4325 square miles, resulting in one policemen per 4.9 square miles. Government Order (hereafter G.O.) 753, Judicial, 28 December 1925. G.O.169 Judicial 4 February 1905, Tamil Nadu Archives (hereafter TNA).
7.These figures include urban centres, and are from 1928, midway through the period studied here. G.O. 243 Public Police, 17 April 1930, TNA.
8.There is an extensive literature on spatial theory and modern cartography. For this paper, I have relied principally upon Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991); and Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: the geographical construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
9.James Scott, Seeing like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 11.
10.Manu Goswami, Producing India : From Colonial Economy to National Space (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 45.
11.Foreword by Nicholas Dirks in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), xv.
12.Gyan Prakash, ‘The Colonial Genealogy of Society: community and political modernity in India ,’ in The Social in Question: New bearings in history and the social sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).
13.Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
14.Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
15.Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the rule of law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
16.In the 1925 Tirunelveli reallocation, 31% of all constables hired were for KD beats and 17% to patrol the high roads, while the corresponding numbers for Madurai district were 16 and 8% respectively. In addition, constables were also allotted to ‘miscellaneous beats.’ G.O. 750 Press, Judicial, 28 December 1925, G.O. 753 Press, Judicial, 28 December 1925, TNA.
17.G.O.753 Press, Judicial, 28 December 1925, TNA. See also G.O. 750 Press, Judicial, 28 December 1925 for several similar examples.
18.G.O. 3496 (ms), Home, 15 July 1938, TNA. For more examples, see G.O. 467 (ms), Public Police, 31 August 1935, TNA.
19.G.O. 3496 (ms), Home, 15 July 1938, TNA.
20.A serai is an inn. East India (Police). Report of the Indian Police Commission and Resolution of the Government of India. London, 1905, par. 140.
21.Criminal tribe discourse has been widely discussed in South Asian historiography. See, among others, Anand Pandian, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating virtue in South India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: ‘Criminal tribes’ and British colonial policy (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 2001).
22. Kaval skirted the line between pillage and protection. In some cases, kavalgars (policemen) were regularly paid by villagers for their security; in case of theft, they retrieved the goods or reimbursed the victim. In others, villagers paid the policemen fees to be exempted from theft. In most colonial writing, kaval was depicted as a form of extortion that had flourished in the political chaos of the eighteenth century, a claim that bolstered the legitimacy of colonial rule. The colonial government attempted to eradicate kaval for over a century, with no success.
23.For the interplay between colonial anthropology and governance in objectifying caste identities, see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
24.Of the census, Cohn writes that ‘through the asking of questions and the compiling of information in categories which the British rulers could utilize for governing, it provided an arena for Indians to ask questions about themselves.’ Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,’ in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 230.
25.Manur police station, Mavadi village records, 10 May 1943.
26.Manur police station, Melapillayarkulam village records, 1943.
27.Panavadali Chatram police station, Sayamalai Valasai–Kokkulam village records, 10 February 1946.
28.Manur police station, Pallikkottai village record
s, May 1943.
29.G.O. 243 (ms), Public Police, 17 April 1930, TNA.
30.G.O. 243 (ms), Public Police, 17 April 1930, TNA.
31.The acronym KD was so commonly used that it slipped into spoken language as a Tamil word. For instance, Kedi Billa Killadi Ranga is the name of a Tamil film released in 2013. ‘Notified member’ referred to someone notified under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1911. Kavalgars were native police that the state had criminalized. A habitual offender was someone who had been convicted for more than one crime.
32.Planning documents rarely define these terms, assuming knowledge of them. G.O. 750 Press, Judicial, 28 December 1925, G.O. 753 Press, Judicial, 28 December 1925, TNA.
33.Police beats were especially important in Mudukulathur, where the government had rescinded the Criminal Tribes Act, 1911 for the local Maravars in 1929, and instead proposed that ‘what was needed in this tract of country was the construction of roads and the opening of police stations.’ G.O. 151 (mis), Law, 22 January 1929 and Memorandum no 583–581, Judicial, 22 February 1929, cited in G.O. 243 Public Police 1930, TNA.
34.G.O. 243 Public Police 17 April 1930, TNA.
35.G.O. 243 Public Police 17 April 1930, TNA.
36.That is, Part IV of the Station Crime History. Part I of the Station Crime History listed the crimes that had been registered for that year; Part II was a schematic map of the station limits and indicated the geographic distribution of crime; Part III was a register of the known criminals within that area. G.O. 1364 Judicial 5 December 1922, TNA.
37.Pallars are a local Dalit caste.
38.Village officers—VM (Village Munsif) was the headman and the karnam was the accountant.
39. Bundobust—preparatory security arrangements.
40.Manur police station, Manur village records, date c.1932.
41.I found no mention of gender related conflict in the police records that I read, except in cases where these overlapped with inheritance disputes. In contrast, this is a prominent theme in Dalit feminist writing. Bama, tr. Lakshmi Holmstrom, Sangati: Events (New Delhi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Viramma, Josiane Racine, and Jean-Luc Racine, Viramma, Life of an Untouchable (New York, Paris: Verso; UNESCO Publishing, 1997).
42.The colonial conception of an unchanging village community is seen in this police measure of maintaining continuous village notes. See David Ludden, ‘Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,’ in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, eds Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
43.Manur police station, Kanarpatti village records.
44.Similar cases of undated signatures following the opening Part IV information is found for Taghanallore village, Mavadi village, Manur village, and Pillayarkulam village, all in Manur station.
45.For a description of the socio-spatial dynamics of domination and subordination in a Tirunelveli village, see Diane P. Mines, Fierce Gods: Inequality, ritual, and the politics of dignity in a South Indian village (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
46.Manur police station, Mavadi village records.
47.Manur police station, Therkukulam village records.
48. Surveillance and suppression were not the only responses of the state to these politics of space. Several government orders from across the twentieth century allot land to marginalized communities (Christians, Muslims, Dalits) for burial and cremation grounds and housing complexes.
49.Manur station records, Mavadi village, September 1937.
50.Thazhiyoothu station, Thazhiyoothu village, April 1937. CPC—Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898.
51.Thazhiyoothu station, Thazhiyoothu village, 22 December 1937. R.C.—Roman Catholic. C.I.—Circle Inspector.
52.Manoor station, Melapillayarkulam village, 1938.
53.Thazhiyoothu station, Chatram Kudiyiruppu village, Chittanpacheri, 1939. S.I.—Sub-Inspector.
54.For the classic text on interpreting official writing, see Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,’ in Ranajit Guha ed. Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
55.Thazhiyoothu station, Thazhiyoothu village, April 1937.
56.Thazhiyoothu station, Rajavallipuram village, 22 December 1937.
57.Thazhiyoothu station, Chatram Kudiyiruppu village, 30 September 1934.
58.Sankarankoil police station, Vaadikkottai village, 30 June 1937.
59.Manur station, Melapillayarkulam village, 1938.
60.Manur station, Manur village, 28 June 1945.
61.Thazhiyoothu station, Chatram Kudiyiruppu village, Chittanpacheri, 22 December 1937. Signed by Inspector Padmanabha Iyer.
62.For example, ‘to…secure more efficient management of the station areas, it is proposed to…’; ‘the present Virakeralampudur station…has proved an unmanageable charge’; and ‘the town station will include in its limits a compact and easily manageable block…’ in G.O. 753, Judicial, 28 December 1925, TNA.
63. Fortnightly Report for Madras Presidency for the second half of December 1930, TNA.
64.For example, G.O. 62 (ms) Public Police, 7 February 1933, TNA.
65.Kodaikanal station, located on the hills and clearly an outlier, serviced 413 square miles.
Part III
Dynamics of Colonial Warfare
© 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_8
The Dynamics of British Colonial Violence
Michelle Gordon1
(1)Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK
Michelle Gordon
Email: michellelgordon@hotmail.co.uk
Considering the ubiquity of violence across the British Empire and the extent to which British colonists repeatedly found themselves at war in a vast number of ‘small wars ’, 1 it is essential to research lesser-known British colonial campaigns to illuminate the ways in which outbreaks of violence occurred and how this violence was fundamental to the British imperial system. Historians have increasingly explored the methods of violence used across the Empire, from its inception until its eventual demise. 2 This chapter will consider three examples of British colonial warfare: the Perak War in Malaya (1875–1876); the ‘Hut Tax’ War in Sierra Leone (1898); and the Anglo-Egyptian War of Reconquest in the Sudan (1896–1899). It will examine the importance of colonial administrators in shaping events on the ground, emphasising the relevance of racial prejudices to their interaction with Indigenous populations. It argues that the actions of the ‘men on the spot’ were integral to outbreaks of violence. Racial prejudices are central to explaining a common approach among colonial administrators in their interaction with Indigenous populations across the Empire as well as the willingness of British troops to utilise extreme methods of violence. While these campaigns differed in scale and scope, a comparative approach reveals the ways in which these conflicts were all part of the ‘logic’ of the British Empire , which accepted the need for swift and decisive action in the face of any Indigenous opposition to British colonial rule.
The timing of these cases is significant, occurring as they did after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, which is understood as a ‘watershed moment’ regarding the utilisation of extreme violence to suppress Indigenous resistance to British rule. 3 The incidents under discussion were part of a long European tradition of colonial warfare and each campaign utilised a variety of methods of violence to enforce and maintain the British Empire . Those methods included collective reprisals, scorched earth policies, punitive expeditions , looting, a disregard for international standards of warfare, and the neglect and massacring of the enemy wounded. These military tactics were justified as necessary based on the ‘uncivilised’ nature of the ‘natives’. Racial prejudice and the fundamental imbalance between the
‘coloniser’ and the ‘colonised’ created inherently violent situations. In the cases to be examined in this chapter, as across the Empire, brutal suppression of any resistance was viewed as necessary to ‘teach’ the local population the ‘benefits’ of British rule.