Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India

Rao, Anupama

doi:10.1080/13698010120059609

Cited by 28 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…One might also observe that the abolition of torture (including waterboarding) in the West was never absolute: imperial powers simply removed it to their peripheries, to be used against "uncivilized" enemies or colonial subjects. 130 In 1968, The Washington Post could publish a front-page photograph of a US soldier waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner, commenting that the technique was 'fairly common'. 131 However, by refusing to acknowledge basic facts (i.e.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

Cox

2018

International Relations

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The debate on waterboarding and the wider debate on torture remains fiercely contested. President Trump and large sections of the US public continue to support the use of waterboarding and other so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' as part of the 'War on Terror', thus putting the anti-torture norm under pressure. This article demonstrates that the re-imagining of waterboarding as 'torture-lite' is contradicted by the long history of waterboarding itself. Examining pre-modern uses and descriptions of torture and waterboarding, this article highlights that the post-2001 identification of waterboarding as a relatively benign interrogation technique radically inverts a norm that has predominated for over 600 years. This historical norm unequivocally identifies waterboarding not only as torture but as severe torture.The article highlights the value of historically contextualizing attitudes to torture, reviews how and why waterboarding was downgraded by the Bush Administration, reveals the earliest explicit description of waterboarding from 1384, and argues that 2 the twenty-first-century re-imagining of waterboarding as torture-lite is indicative of the fragility of the anti-torture norm.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

Cox

2018

International Relations

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“…In recent decades, the historiography has increasingly become aware of the question of “caste” and how it shaped the police–public relations . This emerges especially from the historiography of the police “torture” (Arnold, ; Chatterji, ; Heath, ; Peers, ; Rao, ). Since the 1980s, “torture” has gained importance in the historiography.…”

Section: Police Torture and The Caste Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rao () has studied such a case of torture from the Bombay Presidency known as “Nasik Torture Case” (1855), in which a lower caste man called Gunnoo, a Kunbi (a broad category of lower caste agriculturists in the region of Maharashtra), was tortured by the police peons, who had “put a stick up his anus for extorting confession.” The victim died 2 days later because of the wounds. Rao studied “the ways in which colonial law not only participated in a regime of torture but also sought to erase its own complicity in this regime” (p. 187).…”

Section: Police Torture and The Caste Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Heath (), in an important article, has argued that torture often involved sexual violence against men, who were also sometimes raped. Like Rao (), Heath also focused on a case in which a lower caste man named Rahmat Musalli, a Muslim untouchable, was accused of theft in 1915 in the village of Mokhal in northern Punjab. During his torture, he was “struck on the penis and testicles” and was raped (Heath, , p. 123).…”

Section: Police Torture and The Caste Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Police–public relations in colonial India

Singh

2019

History Compass

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The police–public relations in colonial India were characterized by incivility, harshness, and violence towards the public, especially the marginalized sections of the society. In turn, the police functioning suffered from public distrust and apathy. How did historians explain this unsatisfactory nature of the police–public relations? This article is a study of the historiography of policing since the 1980s to understand how this problem has been understood. It emerges that since the 1980s, the dominant paradigm in the historiography has used a variety of social concepts such as “the propertied classes,” “the urban poor,” and “the neighbourhood networks” to explain the nature of the relationship between the police and the policed. This dominant paradigm has laid emphasis on material backgrounds and has largely ignored the importance of cultural background of the police and the policed. However, another strand in the historiography, revolving around the question of the police torture, has suggested that the cultural background of the police and especially the policed also played a crucial role in determining whose body could be tortured. It is hoped that in the future, scholars will shift away from narrow material explanation to an approach that will also consider the sociocultural background of the police and the policed.

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“…46 46 A similar argument to this has also been made by Anupama Rao but concerning the acts of torture committed by the colonial police. A. Rao, ‘Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India’, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 3/2 (2001), 186–205. …”

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confidence: 99%

Histories of Everyday Violence In British India

Saha

2011

History Compass

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Historians of British India and colonial rule more generally have inevitably had to approach the difficult subject of colonial violence. Often, however, historians have explored colonial violence by focusing on exceptional and spectacular moments. Recently two books have been published that shift the terms of the historiography by examining colonial violence as an aspect of everyday life in British India: Taylor Sherman’s State Violence and Punishment in India and Elizabeth Kolsky’s Colonial Justice in British India. This article examines the limitations of the established literature’s characterisation of colonial violence, before comparing the work of Kolsky and Sherman. Both of their studies demonstrate that physical violence was an intrinsic and everyday aspect of the colonial encounter in India, and they lay the groundwork for further studies of everyday colonial violence.

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Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India

Cited by 28 publications

References 10 publications

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

Police–public relations in colonial India

Histories of Everyday Violence In British India

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