The Facilitators I: Policing

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial state

Conclusion: Torture in a State of Exception

Colonial Terror concludes by exploring how the attempts of the British colonial regime in India, in the decades following the Madras torture commission, to deny the ongoing prevalence of torture in the Indian police began to unravel in the early twentieth century thanks to the emergence of a voluble Indian press and a mass nationalist movement. But it was not until 1909, following the failures of a series of high-profile ‘conspiracy’ trials due to the ongoing reliance of the police on extorted confessions as their primary form of evidence, combined with pressure exerted by yet another group of reformist MPs, that torture once again erupted into scandal. The Indian and British governments were thus forced to act, but although the actions they took exposed the sheer scale of police torture in colonial India, they did little, once again, to attempt to eradicate it, since eradication was impossible thanks to the importance of torture to the maintenance of colonial rule. They endeavoured, instead, to make it disappear by renaming it, as well as to transform India into a fully-fledged state of exception in which police torture could continue to flourish, freed from the constraints placed on it by the rule of law.

The Facilitators II: Law and ‘Justice’

This chapter continues the exploration of the ways in which torture was facilitated in colonial India begun in Chapter 2 by analysing the role of the judicial system in such a process. It argues that the creation of an enabling legal environment for torture was vital to the construction of India as a regime of exception. The chapter examines how, although extra-legal torture was enshrined as an offence in the Indian Penal Code and other legal provisions were made during the course of the nineteenth century to make it more difficult for the police to commit torture, the law, and with it the wider judicial system, ultimately did little to limit their official discretion to do so, most notably through privileging confessions over other forms of evidence. The chapter also considers the nature and operation of the judicial system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly how the recruitment and training (or lack thereof) of magistrates and judges, colonial evidentiary norms, the over-reliance on medical testimony, the management of police violence extra-judiciously, and the lack of separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive enabled police torture.

Violence, the Exception, and Bare Life

Rather than being an aberrant act of violence, police torture in colonial India was instead simply a visible manifestation of a much broader history of quotidian, structural, and ‘civilizing’ violence. Such forms of violence, this chapter suggests, ruptured and unmade the world of the colonized, who in turn resorted to violence as a means of world-making or re-worlding. The chapter examines, in addition, how violence operated in relation to the exception through engaging with both Giorgio Agamben’s work on states of exception and Foucault’s insights on governmentality, and argues that two levels of exceptionality were in operation in contexts such as colonial India that essentially rendered them regimes of exception in which much of the colonized population was rendered what Agamben refers to as homo sacer, and thus capable of being killed with impunity.

The Perpetrators

This chapter turns from the facilitation of torture to its perpetration. It endeavours to explicate the agency of the torturers, especially why they chose to do what they did, through analysing the key factors that transformed Indian police officers into perpetrators of torture, who the police tortured, and how they did so. Focusing on why sexual violence, in particular, became a key component of Indian policing, the chapter draws upon what Ervin Straub terms the ‘three levels’ of torture in order to elucidate the motivations and psychological processes that drove subaltern Indian men to become torturers, the particular group dynamics and institutional structures that led to the production of a culture of torture in the Indian police, and the historical processes and cultural characteristics that provided fertile ground for the emergence of torture and other forms of extreme harm doing. Since torturers are made, not born, the chapter suggests, in addition, that police torturers in colonial India be viewed not only as perpetrators of colonial violence but as victims of it.

Introduction: Torture, Empire, and the Exception

Colonial Terror begins with an examination of a historic case before the High Court of England and Wales in 2011 regarding torture in colonial Kenya that exposed facets of the brutal violence that sustained Britain’s empire, and argues that the case and its aftermath offer a number of insights into the role of extraordinary violence in the operation of colonial states, and with it to the maintenance of imperial and colonial sovereignties, in addition to the discourses and practices of denial regarding British culpability for torture and other forms of colonial violence. After elucidating the book’s key arguments regarding the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of British colonial rule in India the introduction then considers both the virtual absence of colonial violence from British historical memory and recent scholarship on such violence in former British colonial contexts that seeks to redress such an absence. Proposing that scholars of colonial violence need to broaden their understanding of, and approaches to, violence, as well as the impact of violence on both bodies and minds, the introduction goes on to examine the scholarly literatures on, and lacunae in, colonial policing, colonial law, the colonial state, colonial sovereignties, and the use of torture and terror to construct and maintain such sovereignties, and suggests ways in which Colonial Terror will address such omissions.