Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence

Although British legal codes intoned that the Government of India ‘was established by law', the colonial state in India was established amid extraordinary violence in 1858. The assumption of power in British territories in India by the crown followed what historians agree was the most significant revolt against the excesses of the East India Company - the rebellion of 1857 - following the mutiny of Indian troops in the Company's army in north India, which catalysed a wide spectrum of opposition to the British presence.

The British victory over rebels and insurgents in warfare that was marked by an unrestrained ferocity cemented its monopoly on violence, identified by Weber as the hallmark of the state.^{^[85]} Significantly, this established an equation of violence as unidirectional, meted out by Britons and their agents on Indian subjects. If and when Indians resorted to violence in response and attacked Britons, this was construed as an illegitimate ‘outrage' or ‘revolt' (depending on the scale) and an unjustifiable inversion of the nature of things.^{^[86]} Whenever the dominance of the state was violently challenged by Indians, this was construed as illegal, which in turn justified the full disciplinary apparatus of the state, including detention and execution. By i860, inciting disaffection with the state even by word would become illegal, according to Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, inviting a lengthy and punitive prison sentence - although colonial officials found this remarkably hard to enforce, given the vagueness of the law.

At the same time, eruptions of ‘native' violence were crucial to justify state repression, including the costs of maintaining an extensive army, which early nationalists deplored. Military charges were the largest single budget item in British India, accounting for between 40 and 50 per cent of government expenditure in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.^{^[87]} Moreover, incidents of native rebellion were frequently used to bolster arguments that Indians were politically immature and incapable of self-governance.

Just as the Black Hole of Calcutta had been deployed as a justificatory narrative to support the aggressive expansionism of the East India Company, the rebellion in 1857 provided fresh and equally selective lessons to provide the basis for further subjugation, not only in India, but in the British Empire at large. During the Mutiny, anything short of brutal and summary execution of Indian suspects was construed as a weakness that was not becoming of an empire.6 The string of atrocity stories arising from the 1857 rebellion came lavishly illustrated, forming the matrix of late nineteenth-century colonial culture in the form of novels, newspapers, memoirs and (later) film. These perpetuated an instructive undercurrent of fear, of what might happen if power were not assertively maintained, and a consequent rationale for repressive activities against Indian subjects, thereby simultaneously justifying state violence and applauding the state's restraint.

The sanitised language that would later be used to describe the ‘pacification' of post-rebellion north India was revealing of an awareness that while violence was indispensable in times of crisis, it could not be relied upon to maintain stability. This was especially so given the skewed ratio of Briton to Indian in the subcontinent, and the evident fragility of loyalties in the army. While the ratio of Briton to Indian in the British Indian Army was increased after 1857, the reliance on Indians to serve in repressive institutions such as the army, the police and prisons would remain. In the army in particular, this was tempered by a regimental ‘divide-and-rule' policy in which ethnically or religiously selected regiments could be called upon to fire upon fellow Indians of other ethnic or religious denominations.^{^[88]} ^{^[89]} This reliance on collaborative repression became increasingly problematic, especially as anticolonial organisations began to expand in the twentieth century.

Until the challenge of mass nationalism in the twentieth century, the military would only be deployed in a limited fashion, in localised, small-scale peasant conflicts, or in overseas wars or imperial conflicts, where Indian revenues financed additional imperial manpower, most notably in the two world wars. The colonial state would work over the next fifty years to establish a more elaborate framework of coercion, enabling apologists to maintain that Britain had not established a military state in India.^{^[90]}

Despite the insinuation that 1857 constituted the greatest single challenge to British rule, there were regular rebellions against British authority. These rebellions were dismissed as the rabble-rousing of uninformed peasants, from the Deccan riots of the 1890s to the Moplah Rebellion of the 1920s. Yet these, and earlier violent movements like the Santal Rebellion of the 1850s, left a paper trail of memorials and petitions to the colonial government outlining the oppression of excessive taxation, rent-hungry landlords protected by the colonial administration, and arbitrary miscarriages of justice. Thus, the disempowered and the illiterate (at least in English, the language of the colonial state) were not as voiceless as often assumed by historians. They were able to find spokesmen who would put their grievances into words, before peaceful options were exhausted and violence broke out, with the certainty of failure and death, in some cases mediated by the millenarian hope of invulnerability provided against firearms by divine intervention against moral and social injustice.^{^[91]}

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence

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