This was my first book, published by Cornell University Press in 2021, and available on open access. It explores the entwined world of caste and state politics by focusing on a small region, the districts of Madura, Tinnevelly, and Ramnad under British rule. Today it includes Madurai, Theni, Dindigul, Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi, Ramanathapuram, Sivagangai, and Virudhunagar districts.

Police Matters began to take its shape the day I walked into a tiny police station in Manur, near the port town of Thoothukudi. It was January 2013; I was close to completing the second leg of my dissertation research in India before flying back to my university to begin writing my thesis chapters. Through this two-month trip, I had tried to find records that were kept within the police stations themselves, instead of wending their way to the state archives as did most other government documents. After several dead ends, I had finally found them, thanks to the help of contacts in Chennai. I couldn’t believe my eyes as I read page after page of detailed state records on criminals and informers for each village that was attached to the station. I realized that the colonial state had had a very real presence in the Tamil countryside at the everyday level. 

The way the police institution managed its presence – through beats, investigation records, temporary executive orders like Sec. 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1898, – was the subject of my dissertation. My book narrowed the focus to analyzing the impact of everyday policing specifically on caste. It argues that by categorizing legal subjects based on their caste, the police brought legal and epistemic violence into the Tamil countryside, transforming its way of life. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Far from being the dregs of a premodern past, modern caste politics has been shaped in conjunction with state policing.