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Witnessing Violence, Witnessing as Violence: Police Torture and Power in Twentieth-Century India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2021

Radha Kumar Open the ORCID record for Radha Kumar [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

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Articles
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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 946 - 970
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The author thanks Bhavani Raman, Nikhil Menon, and the anonymous reviewers for Law & Social Inquiry for their formative comments on earlier versions of this article.

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