Exploring violent disagreement among the country and the inhabitants in colonial and postcolonial India, this ebook is either a learn of the numerous concepts of colonial coercion and country violence and a cultural heritage of the various ways that Indians imbued practices of punishment with their very own meanings and reinterpreted acts of country violence of their personal political campaigns.

This paintings examines country violence from a old standpoint, increasing the examine of punishment past the legal through investigating the interaction among imprisonment, corporal punishment, collective fines and country violence. It offers a clean examine seminal occasions within the historical past of mid-twentieth century India, corresponding to the bloodbath at Jallianwala Bagh, the non-cooperation and civil disobedience routine, the give up India crusade, and the Hindu-Muslim riots of the Nineteen Thirties and Forties. The publication extends its research into the postcolonial interval via contemplating the ways that partition after which the fight opposed to a communist insurgency reshaped practices of punishment and country violence within the first decade after independence. finally, this study demanding situations winning conceptions of the character of the country in colonial and postcolonial India, that have tended to imagine that the country had the ambition and the power to exploit the police, army and paperwork to dominate the inhabitants at will. It argues, to the contrary, that the kingdom in twentieth-century India tended to be self-limiting, susceptible, and replete with tensions.

Relevant to these drawn to modern India and the background of empire and decolonisation, this paintings offers a brand new framework for the examine of kingdom violence with a view to be valuable to students of South Asian reports; violence, crime and punishment; and colonial and postcolonial history.