The Colonial Origins Of Ethnic Violence In India

The neighboring north Indian districts of Jaipur and Ajmer are identical in language, geography, and religious and caste demography. But when the famous Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed in 1992, Jaipur burned while Ajmer remained peaceful; when the state clashed over low-caste affirmative action quotas in 2008, Ajmer's residents rioted while Jaipur's citizens stayed calm. What explains these divergent patterns of ethnic conflict across multiethnic states? Using archival research and elite interviews in five case studies spanning north, south, and east India, as well as a quantitative analysis of 589 districts, Ajay Verghese shows that the legacies of British colonialism drive contemporary conflict. Because India served as a model for British colonial expansion into parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, this project links Indian ethnic conflict to violent outcomes across an array of multiethnic states, including cases as diverse as Nigeria and Malaysia. The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India makes important contributions to the study of Indian politics, ethnicity, conflict, and historical legacies.

From Darfur to the Rwandan genocide, journalists, policymakers, and scholars have blamed armed conflicts in Africa on ancient hatreds or competition for resources. Here, Tsega Etefa compares three such cases—the Darfur conflict between Arabs and non-Arabs, the Gumuz and Oromo clashes in Western Oromia, and the Oromo-Pokomo conflict in the Tana Delta—in order to offer a fuller picture of how ethnic violence in Africa begins. Diverse communities in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya alike have long histories of peacefully sharing resources, intermarrying, and resolving disputes. As he argues, ethnic conflicts are fundamentally political conflicts, driven by non-inclusive political systems, the monopolization of state resources, and the manipulation of ethnicity for political gain, coupled with the lack of democratic mechanisms for redressing grievances.

Shows how colonial indirect rule and land tenure institutions create state weakness, ethnic inequality and insurgency in India, and around the world.

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across colonial Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, Martin Thomas explores the structure of local police forces, their involvement in colonial labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent. His work sheds new light on broader trends in the direction and intent of colonial state repression. It shows that the management of colonial economies, particularly in crisis conditions, took precedence over individual imperial powers' particular methods of rule in determining the forms and functions of colonial police actions. The politics of colonial labour thus became central to police work, with the depression years marking a watershed not only in local economic conditions but also in the breakdown of the European colonial order more generally.

This book explores the theme of violence, repression and atrocity in imperial and colonial empires, as well as its representations and memories, from the late eighteenth through to the twentieth century. It examines the wide variety of violent means by which colonies and empire were maintained in the modern era, the politics of repression and the violent structures inherent in empire. Bringing together scholars from around the world, the book includes chapters on British, French, Dutch, Italian and Japanese colonies and conquests. It considers multiple experiences of colonial violence, ranging from political dispute to the non-lethal violence of everyday colonialism and the symbolic repression inherent in colonial practices and hierarchies. These comparative case studies show how violence was used to assert and maintain control in the colonies, contesting the long held view that the colonial project was of benefit to colonised peoples.

In a penetrating account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in India, C. A. Bayly shows how networks of Indian spies were recruited by the British to secure military, political and social information about their subjects. He also examines the social and intellectual origins of these 'native informants', and considers how the colonial authorities interpreted and often misinterpreted the information they supplied. It was such misunderstandings which ultimately contributed to the failure of the British to anticipate the rebellions of 1857. The author argues, however, that even before this, complex systems of debate and communication were challenging the political and intellectual dominance of the European rulers.

Examines the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality through the history of transgender Hijras in north India.