This article challenges the conception that the police are solely responsible for the enduring practice of custodial violence. Instead of seeing police personnel as bad apples in a largely ethical police institution, or even seeing policing is the violent and corruptible arm of a non-violent and just law, I argue that police practice, which draws on criminal procedure, reflects the biases of the larger society within which it operates. To put it bluntly, society is unequal, the law is unequal; violent policing is merely a stark and extreme expression of these inequalities. While the book navigated this theme of police embeddedness by showing the co-constitution of police power and caste power, here I shift to the nitty-gritty of investigations into allegations of police torture.
Colonial rhetoric in British India was emphatically opposed to torture as a police investigatory technique and colonial administrators suspected Indian policemen as being culturally prone to violence. Therefore, in investigations into cases of torture, colonial law privileged so-called objective and expert testimony over the voices of policemen. Unfortunately, these forms of evidence also inevitably disqualified the voice of the tortured, whose oral testimony emphasized their experience and pain over dates, medical details, and so forth. Specifically, the Criminal Procedure Code, 1898 emphasized three forms of evidence to determine the culpability of police personnel in cases of custodial injury or death: the testimony of “respectable” persons, medical reports, and written police records. These were seen as objective forms of evidence, more reliable than the subjective testimony of the victims or their near and dear ones. Of course, in practice, the police inevitably had better access to all three forms of evidence than did the objects of their violence, so that they were inevitably acquitted in cases of torture. The article thus locates police impunity in evidentiary protocol rather than individual corruption.
Tragically, far from providing redress to marginalized victims of state violence, investigation into torture itself reinforces the social walls separating the “respectable” (upper-caste men), the professional (doctors), and the literate (station writers) from society's marginalized sections. In these circumstances, serving as witness to police violence in a court is in itself an act of violence.
This piece addresses gendered aspects of police violence which are not often immediately visible in the legal archive. I look at two colonial-era riots that took place between the Maravar and Nadar caste communities, who were at loggerheads over a range of issues including caste precedence and economic mobility. The first riot occurred in 1899, in the small town of Sivakasi, and the second in 1918, in Kamudi town, fifty miles away. While the colonial police used caste as a form of classification even in routine matters, riots such as these reflected an extreme moment in the use of caste as a category of state knowledge. It was entire communities rather than individuals that bore the brunt of judicial action in the aftermath of these riots.
In these riots, the police labeled one of the two participating castes, the Maravar, as the aggressor. Accordingly, they embarked on an aggressive campaign to arrest Maravar men across the region. Those who escaped the police net did so by absconding, sometimes for years on end. Since Maravar were typically the numerically dominant caste in this region, entire villages were denuded of their men. In the absence of their companions, Maravar women were left to shoulder domestic burdens alone. The article argues that this too was colonial legal violence.
This accessible volume edited by two experts on policing brings together contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, human rights lawyers, and those who have been at the receiving end of unjust police violence in India. I contribute a chapter on how everyday policing practices which contributed to preserving caste hierarchies in colonial India continue into the present day.