The Power/Knowledge Nexus
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, forms of power/knowl- edge and bureaucratic strategies informed by such knowledge began to legitimate colonial domination, largely precluding the need for force.
Anthropological theories were applied to Indian castes and tribes in an attempt to predict loyalty and perfidy based on a range of racial and/or physical characteristics. These theories were deeply problematic, framed within Orientalist assumptions and presuming as they did that Indian subjects could be reduced to a series of group identities according to caste, religion or region. And yet they informed a range of government projects, from the restructuring of the army by recruiting only ‘martial races' to ensure fealty, to the pre-emptive punishment that was enshrined in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Ethnographic assessments were intimately tied to the census, which sought to enumerate, control and presage the behaviours of India's castes, tribes and races. The subsequent persecution of and use of violence (seen as ‘reasonable force') against newly defined ‘savage' elements in British India demonstrated that knowledge was more than merely discursive. Technologies of the state such as the census, which by 1891 had become decennial, broke up the population into relatively manageable units, aggregated along the lines of region, caste, religion and gender; and regulations that demarcated sections of the population as ‘criminal tribes', believed to be inherently prone to violence, thieving and plunder, justified a variety of punitive measures. Prisons were sites of intense violence against the person of the prisoner, ranging from murder of inmates to torture to various forms of sensory deprivation.[92] [93] [94] [95]One of the most protracted debates about British imperialism in the subcontinent revolves around the degree to which the Indian economy was reorganised to ensure British profit.11 Economic mismanagement formed the basis of Indian accusations about ‘unBritish rule' in the late nineteenth century.12 While this critique was initially mounted in rather abstract terms, it can be related to a process that has recently been identified by scholars as structural violence, in which the manipulation of social and economic structures by governments results in the deprivation of the conditions necessary to sustain longevity of life. Mike Davis's devastating critique of imperial famines in India as ‘late Victorian holocausts' provides a sobering account of mundane government protocols, provocative for its comparison of the Raj to the Nazi state, in its perpetration of mass death by economic policy.13 This challenges prevalent Victorian imagery of British India as an Oriental melange of Kipling, tiger hunts and princes, but in fact these icons too can be seen as reflecting state violence.
Much of Kipling's work, for example, is set against the backdrop of some sort of military aggression. ‘Gunga Din', Kipling's classic ode to a water-carrier who was ‘belted and flayed' by the soldiers he served, for example describes the exploits of a British regiment advancing into hostile territory.
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