This chapter provides an overview of the role of violence in the operations of the colonial state in India, with reflections on how its various explicit and implicit modalities defined imperialism,
shaped anticolonialism, constructed concepts of the nation, hardened communal identities, and informed the constitution and practices of the early independent Indian state, which sought to inherit the ‘legitimate monopoly of violence' from its predecessor.
Accepting the narratives encoded into colonial accounts of the Raj, which tell of the triumphant establishment of pax Britannica in a turbulent subcontinent, will not do; nor will a narrow conceptualisation of violence as pure physical force explain the longevity of Her (and, after the death of Queen Victoria, His) Majesty's Government in India. A list of different modalities of violence evident in India would include, but not be limited to: the manifest violence in warfare; military or police action; the establishment of the rule of law, which legitimised and sanitised state violence and delegitimised Indian resistance; the prevalence of interpersonal ‘white' violence (in the form of everyday cuffs and aggressions meted out by Britons to Indian subjects); the displays of force that were encoded into pageantry and ceremonial exhibitions of power that formed the very culture of the Raj; and the structural violence that resulted from the reorientation of the Indian economy for British profit. These modalities were pervasive, overlapping and mutually reinforcing.We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism', a term used extensively in South Asian studies to describe the mobilisation of ethnic and especially religious identities, frequently ending in conflict. Such a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was marred by the extraordinary violence of partition.
There are good reasons to be sceptical of British pretensions to use physical violence as only a last resort and in exceptional circumstances, but it is equally important to interrogate presumptions that the Indian anti-colonial movement was both singular, and singularly non-violent. There were many different strains and ideologies that informed Indian nationalism, and much questioning of the viability of non-violence as a political strategy. Incidents of political violence by Indian revolutionary groups targeted at British interests in the subcontinent threw Gandhian non-violence into stark relief, rendering Gandhi a viable political leader in the eyes of the British.1 Moments of political violence by revolutionary organisations - construed as ‘terrorists' by the British - were often directly inspired by acts of state violence in its different modalities.
Until recently, there has been surprisingly little emphasis on the violent nature of colonialism in British India,[83] [84] or, for that matter, on the strains of violence in Indian anti-colonialism. This is perhaps a product of the early dominance of British historiography in South Asian Studies, which tended to focus on liberal strains within the colonial state. It may also be the case that an over-reliance by historians on the administrative records generated by the Government of India in the colonial archive - embedded in discourses that justified or elided incidents of state violence as exceptional - has frustrated scholarly interrogation of violence in British India. Recent methodological interventions and the broadening of the field of South Asian Studies have opened up fresh concerns and concepts of what constitutes an archive, throwing up new evidence that provides a very different narrative of imperialism in the subcontinent. In 1947, the independent state inherited many of the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it: an irony, given the nature of nationalist critique that questioned the legitimacy of a state that relied extensively upon the use of force.