ABSTRACT
This book explores the nature of the state in twentieth-century India by examining the practices of punishment and state violence which were used to counter large-scale unrest in India between 1919 and 1956. On one level this is a study of the different coercive techniques developed by the Indian state, and of the popular strategieswhich shaped these tactics. The following chapters significantly expand the study of punishment, which, hitherto, has focused almost exclusively on the prison. To this end, they develop the idea of the ‘coercive network’ to understand the interconnected institutions, laws and practices that made up the state’s coercive repertoire. Far from being limited to a single institution, coercive practices ranged from firing on crowds and bombing from the air, to dismissal from one’s place of work or study, to collective fines, imprisonment and corporal punishment. Sanctionsweremeted out not only by state employees acting through formal legal procedures, but also by intermediaries, quasi-state actors and private parties, whose actions were sometimes only tangentially linked to the formal criminal justice system. Moreover, these sanctions were always part of larger imperial agendas and strategies of rule which impacted the quotidian functioning of penal practices. At the same time, this is also a cultural history of state violence, for it seeks to explore the ways in which acts of coercion were interpreted and given meaning, not just by the government, but by the population. Thus, without ignoring the inherently dominant nature of the state in penal practices, this book emphasises the many ways in which the governed used the law and its enforcement as a site of negotiation and confrontation. In turn, it charts the very real changes which these representative processes inspired in the everyday functioning of the state. Ultimately, this research challenges prevailing conceptions of the nature of the state in colonial and post-colonial India, which have tended to assume that the state was able to use the police, military and bureaucracy to dominate the population of India at will. On the contrary, the everyday state in twentiethcentury India tended to be vulnerable, fluid and replete with tensions.
