Implicit and Symbolic Violence

The righteousness of state violence remained a key element in the system of control over British India, even when it was reserved. Implicit or latent violence was strategically displayed across the Indian urban landscape in the form of commemoration and pageantry.

Such prominent reminders were intended to breed compliance in subjects, although by the early twentieth century these symbols merely served to provoke. A prominent statue of General Neill in Madras became the focus of a Gandhian protest in 1927. Its removal was one of the first acts of the provincial Congress government in 1937, leading to animated indignation in the conservative British media and the House of Commons as an act that was ‘offensive to all Europeans in India'.^[96] Memorials to the Black Hole of Calcutta have been twice relocated, in 1940 from the prominent Dalhousie Square to the relative ignominy of a nearby churchyard.1^[97] Many Indians wrote feelingly of the quotidian humiliation involved in walking past a statue of John Lawrence outside the High Court in Lahore, the script on whose plinth rhetorically demanded of passers-by: ‘Will you be governed by the pen or the sword?'^[98] The relationship between the two, of course, was intimate: as Walter Benjamin noted, ‘law-making is power-making, and to that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence'.^{[99] [100]}

The co-option of elites, most spectacularly evidenced by the containment of the heads of Princely States showcased at various durbars and ceremonies in Delhi and in London, became a staple of imperial spectacle.1⁸ The implicit violence in a durbar ceremony, replete with its structured parades of regi­ments, cavalry and cannon, is most starkly evident in Pathe footage of the 1911 Delhi Durbar. The grammar of such displays would be later reproduced in the Independence and Republic Day parades of the independent Indian state, indicating that the existence of potential force was in the nature of a display of stateness.