Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. xix, 241 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$20.00, paper. ISBN 9781501761065.
The first generation of historians who studied the police in South Asia under colonial rule, were wont to treat it as primarily an instrument of state violence, seemingly distant and disembedded from South Asian society. In the following decades, a handful of new research on the colonial police, along with scholarship across labour, urban, and agrarian histories, began to question this one-dimensional view. In the last few decades, a contingent of historians and ethnographers has turned to examine the police in South Asia in a new critical light. Taking policing practices and institutions themselves as objects of scrutiny, worthy of inquiry in their own right, this scholarship reveals police presence in colonial South Asia to have been far more pervasive and complex than the earlier histories had accounted for.
Radha Kumar’s book, Policing Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South Asia, 1900–1975, is a significant contribution to this growing body of scholarship. Spanning a relatively underworked period in the history of police in South Asia, her book illuminates how policing shaped the lives and politics of South Asians just as powerfully as it was shaped by wider socio-political changes, across the colonial and postcolonial periods. While engaging with key themes that inform much of the recent scholarship on policing in South Asia (police torture; law and violence; bureaucracy and routine work) Kumar’s book is distinguished by the centre-stage that caste takes in her analysis. In this account of the three Tamil-speaking rural districts of Madurai, Tirunelveli, and Ramanathapuram, police power and caste authority are revealed to have been “mutually constituted at the everyday level by actors who drew power from both institutions” (14).
Kumar develops her argument across five chapters that are organized into two broad parts. Part I, “Police and the Everyday State,” delves into a set of routine police processes in early twentieth century Madras Province: everyday surveillance (chapter 1), police record keeping (chapter 2), and detention and custodial torture (chapter 3). Chapter 1 stands out for Kumar’s novel and effective use of the so-called part IV police records. Collected from rural police stations, these records have enabled her to capture a level of rural police work that, until now, had largely remained beyond the reach of much of the existing police histories in South Asia that are commonly written out of centralized government repositories. Parallelly, Kumar tracks the changing status of a set of key caste groups in the region: the steadily prosperous upper-caste Chettiars; the once prominent and now declining Thevars and Naickers; the upwardly mobile mercantile Nadars; and the persistently marginalized and criminalized Maravars, Kallars, and Koravars. Together, the first three chapters demonstrate how thoroughly the persistent need to optimize paltry administrative resources—which permeated rural policing at every level, from determining the location of police stations and beat lines, to informing the social background of police recruits, and the selective criminalization of certain social groups over others—drew upon the caste-based hierarchies that structured rural society. She deftly shows how older forms of caste privileges and prejudices blended with colonial forms of knowledge to inform changes in both the logic of policing and the experience of being policed. The recruitment of local men from the upper and middling castes into the police force inserted the imperative of maintaining the caste status-quo into the workings of state officials. Similarly, members of the middle castes, growing increasingly familiar with policing technologies, especially the practice of filing First Information Reports (FIRs) examined in chapter 2, learned to mobilize the discourse of false cases “as an instrument of everyday politics” (54). Kumar argues that for the middle castes especially, negotiating police authority through collective action and mobilization, emerged in the early twentieth century as a more effective strategy than lengthy, costly, and often ineffectual litigation for managing their status and visibility vis-à-vis the local caste-elites as well as the state. Chapter 3 exposes how police and legal procedure left members of the Dalit castes categorically and disproportionately vulnerable to both police and caste violence in rural Madras.
This key insight serves as a throughline connecting part I and part II, “Policing Popular Politics.” In her study of the contentious boundaries between lawful and unlawful public assemblies, Kumar moves from everyday interactions to episodic encounters between the people and the police. Chapter 4 revises received narratives of riots as a pre-modern form of politics by situating them within longer histories of local caste-conflict, themselves shaped by sustained interactions with the modern police. Her analysis of riots as products of police and magisterial actions—undertaken in the build up to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of public assemblies—rather than events that called for post-facto police intervention, is especially astute. Although accounted for in the earlier chapters, the postcolonial period takes centre-stage in the final chapter.
In the arena of democratic politics, citizens laid claims to public spaces with unequal success. In contrast to the most marginalized Dalit caste-groups, the middling castes, organized into caste-based political rights, once again better managed to negotiate with the state by wielding their numerical strength as powerful voting blocks. Simultaneously, police violence emerged as a double-edged sword—a tool for the ruling parties to thwart mass mobilization in the name of law and order, and a site for the opposition parties to critique state authority. Here, Kumar touches upon the complex ways caste politics braided with labour movements, although a fuller account of this interface would have added depth to her analysis.
Overall, this book is as much a critical history of policing in India as it is a sharp analysis of the social forces that work through the machineries of the modern state to sustain the marginalization of the most oppressed Dalit castes in modern India. This book deserves the attention of both scholars of police and caste politics in South Asia.
Uponita Mukherjee
Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt