Bibliographical Essay

The historiography of violence in India remains separated into thematic specialisations, with an overview of different forms of state and non-state violence not yet available, and the themes not able to speak to one another.

The historiography of the rebellion of 1857-8 has been revised in a multivolume project edited by Crispin Bates et al., Mutiny at the Margins (New Delhi: Sage, 2013-16). Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) provides an overview of institutional arrangements for state violence of the British Indian state at its inception.

Jonathan Saha provides a useful historiographical overview in ‘Histories of Everyday Violence in British India', History Compass, 9.11 (2011), 844-53. The intimate relationship between law and violence is explained in Jordana Bailkin, ‘The Boot and Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?', Comparative Studies in History and Society 48.2 (2006), 462-93. A fresh conceptualisation of how state violence constituted an extensive ‘coercive network' in colonial India is to be found in Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). The close relationship between violence and non-violence, and in particular the reliance of non-violence on the existence of political violence as the basis of its bargaining power, is explored in Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and further in Benjamin Zachariah, Gandhi (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

The rise of communal violence from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century tended to be viewed as the product of colonial policies - symptomatically, see Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) - or as a result of more primordial identities, see Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Regional studies show instigation of violence by the police against Hindus, and/or the move from an overlap of class and community in the structure of a rioting crowd to organised forms of violence: see for instance Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905-1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Sulagna Roy, ‘Communal Conflict in Bengal, 1930-1947', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999.

Studies on the impact of the violence of total war in the subcontinent begin to demonstrate the overlapping of different modalities of violence: see Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). The longer-term roots of organised violence that manifested itself around Partition can be seen in Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Volunteer Organisations and National Discipline in India, 1918-1947', unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick Unversity, 2013. Continuities of colonial measures of state violence can be glimpsed in Duncan McDuie-Ra, ‘Fifty-Year Disturbance: The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Exceptionalism in a South Asian Periphery', Contemporary South Asia 17.3 (2009), 255-70.