New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. viii, 228 pp. US$99.00, cloth. ISBN 9780192893932
Chicago, IL: University of Michigan Press, 2020. xi, 250 pp. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-472-07439-6.
For Weber, the state is the sole social institution with the ability to legally coerce and use force. This power manifests itself through the police, who are, for most people, a symbol of the authority of the state. These two books explore the topic of the abuse of this power by the state to torture people in colonial and independent India.
The first book, Deana Heath’s Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India is a critical history grounded in the thoughts of Achille Mbembe, Giorgio Agamben, Karl Schmidt, and Michel Foucault. To understand colonial order in India, the author argues that it is important to grapple with the term “state of exception” concept introduced in the 1920s by Carl Schmitt, similar to a state of emergency. In consulting the Indian Colonial Archive, Heath notes that in colonial India, the voices of the police involved in torture are absent from the archives, in contrast to the voices of their victims (176). Many of these narratives are legacies of imperialism (42). The book explores the practices of violence in an Arendtian tone (the instrumentality of violence for political ends) and offers a theory on how that violence operated. It aims to better understand how colonial torture impacted the lives and bodies of those forced to be subalterns (24). The book’s central idea is that colonial India existed in “a state of the exception,” which normalized violence. But the violence expressed itself differently towards individuals depending on their gender, race, class, age, caste, and religion (62). Heath claims that terror was central to the operation of the colonial system (40), meaning that police violence and humiliation were routine in British India. Most Indian people “were reduced to bare life” (54). The violence strengthened the hand of the imperial core, and remains largely understudied.
The reasons for ignoring the violence, according to Heath, include current British attitudes towards the empire. At least a third of Britons believe that the empire is an object of pride. A quarter wish it continued to exist. Very few are ashamed of their colonial history, and many believe that the empire was not constructed through violence. The scholarship of those from colonial backgrounds has been dismissed by the British intelligentsia, and for others, British imperial violence is too banal a topic for academic study. John Darwin, an eminent professor at Oxford, argued that studying it would not “add much to the sum of knowledge” (13–14). In response to views like those expressed by Darwin, a critical scholarship movement studying the British Empire’s violent legacy emerged after the start of the war on terror in 2001. It also examined Britain’s post-colonial present and imperial past (17).
The author understands that all imperial projects entail violence and that it was not limited to the British, and notes how the British tried to transform their absolute rule in India towards a rule of law system. This was limited in some ways. For example, the rule of law system in India did not place limits on the British executive in India. It was also introduced in the pursuit of certain goals, namely dressing the “iron fist of the colonial state in a velvet glove” (34). The author points out that the exception was the absence of a legal and legitimate monopoly over violence by the state in India. British India was not a Weberian/Westphalian entity, its borders were not clearly defined, its people were not citizens but rather subjects, and within it might ultimately made right, rather than the reverse. There are also the issues related to pre-colonial India’s relationship with torture and human rights abuses. Making an argument about British imperial violence in India requires a measure of comparison to pre- and post-colonial India. For example, the British adopted the Indian Mughal tradition of executing people by being “blown from a cannon,” so a systematic comparison is called for, and it is absent in the book. Perhaps a more normative analysis could be included in a chapter. After all, the British government’s takeover of governance in India after the First Indian War of Independence (“the Great Mutiny” or “Sepoy Mutiny” in British imperialist terminology) was meant to improve governance in India and reduce the grievances of the population. As Queen Victoria stated in aftermath of the war, “we hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligation of duty which bind us to all our other subjects.” It would be fair to ask whether the replacement of company rule by the British Raj led to a reduction or a modification of the violence, including torture. If it did not, then the “state of exception” argument holds. Perhaps such a comparison or normative analysis could be the aim of a follow-up book. In sum, Heath has written a solid, well-structured book about a very difficult era in history. She conducted extensive work with archival materials and did so without disregarding theoretical rigour and inquiry. Her book allows us to look closely at the topic of violence in colonial India.
In contrast, Jinee Lokaneeta’s The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India concerns independent India. Its themes are broadly the same: torture, police violence, and other violations of human rights. It also delves into information extraction technologies which partially replace torture. These methods emerged in the 1990s and 2000s and are seen as a human rights violation by their critics; the state denies this (38). The book employs dozens of interviews with lawyers, police officers, activists, and ordinary citizens to construct its case. The book shows that the coercive/repressive colonial apparatus described by Heath not only survived but managed to include the latest information technologies to evolve into an effective, frightening, and elegant form. In essence, the author claims that police violence in India is a colonial holdover that placed its roots in the country (27) and that the Indian state is neither Weberian nor a “state of exception” (6). India adopted drug testing narcoanalysis (truth serum), lie detectors, and brain scanning in the early 2000s in an effort to reduce police violence and torture. The author argues that the purpose behind the introduction of these methods was the reduction of deaths in custody, highlighting the dilemma of the policy as both a repressive organ of the state and an institution that is responsible for the well-being of its detainees (18). In chapter 2, the author argues that these methods did not significantly reduce torture in the Indian police custody system. These technological innovations are called “truth machines” in the context of Indian law enforcement and are seen as a form of torture by some Indian human rights activists (25–26). One police officer told the author that the system requires the suspect to be satiated with drugs and alcohol before questioning can start at night.
Displaying innovative use of multiple methods, the author uses two terrorist attacks as case studies, both from 2007: the Mumbai and Mecca Masjid cases (acts of violence and terror). The author argues that the police used torture with suspects in both cases, and that the practice is common in routine criminal investigations, terrorism cases, and in conflict-riven areas (5). The book is enjoyable to read and makes a sincere effort to be factual, but its use of interviews gives it a journalistic and perhaps sensational flavour. The parties she interviews will inevitably present their perspectives, and as a result a researcher needs to conduct more active verification, particularly if the research is based on the development of relationships of trust on the field. In terms of theory, Lokaneeta uses Foucault’s lectures on security, population, and territory. “It is this connection between strengthening and increasing the powers of the state, making good use of the forces of the state, and procuring the happiness of its subjects, that is specific to the police” (28).
To her credit, she does use surveys to check some of the broad claims made. A 2005 survey showed that 87 percent of the respondents felt that the police were corrupt and about 75 percent believed that they offered poor service. In addition, she presents data prepared by the National Human Rights Commission in India.
As with Heath, Lokaneeta’s work focuses on the disadvantaged and the subaltern. It derives from the same theoretical orientation—that of Foucault and Agamben. They differ in terms of the application of these theories and in terms of the time periods they focus on. Both works underline the role of the colonial period in normalizing violence and torture. Heath’s book is an archive-driven critical approach to history that focuses on the colonial period alone, while Lokaneeta’s book is built on the basis of a critical sociology that delves into both the pre-colonial and colonial past as well as the post-colonial present. Best read together, these books make a deep and serious contribution to the question of violence, torture, and human rights globally.
Georgi Asatryan
Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, Moscow
Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow