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

This paintings examines country violence from a old standpoint, increasing the examine of punishment past the criminal by way of investigating the interaction among imprisonment, corporal punishment, collective fines and nation violence. It offers a clean examine seminal occasions within the heritage of mid-twentieth century India, reminiscent of the bloodbath at Jallianwala Bagh, the non-cooperation and civil disobedience routine, the surrender India crusade, and the Hindu-Muslim riots of the Thirties and Forties. The booklet extends its research into the postcolonial interval through 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 examine demanding situations triumphing conceptions of the character of the nation in colonial and postcolonial India, that have tended to imagine that the country had the ambition and the facility to take advantage of the police, army and forms to dominate the inhabitants at will. It argues, to the contrary, that the country in twentieth-century India tended to be self-limiting, weak, and replete with tensions.

Relevant to these drawn to modern India and the heritage of empire and decolonisation, this paintings presents a brand new framework for the learn of kingdom violence that allows you to be worthwhile to students of South Asian stories; violence, crime and punishment; and colonial and postcolonial history.