BOOK-POLICING AND VIOLENCE IN INDIA: COLONIAL ORIGINS AND CONTEMPORARY REALITIES
Edited by Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta
Published by- Speaking Tiger
Price-₹799
Policing and Violence in India arrives at a crucial moment. As India swaps out colonial legal codes for the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the question that remains is this: can superficial linguistic shifts and bureaucratic rebranding undo entrenched legacies of violence? This anthology answers the query with a resounding ‘no’, framing the transitions as mere sartorial changes masking deep continuities — an old architecture of control now bolstered by technological mis developments and digital surveillance.
The anthology brings together historians, legal scholars, anthropologists, activists, lawyers, and survivors to map how the Indian police, conceived as colonial enforcers, remain “violence workers” today — labourers in a State-sanctioned economy of brutality. Organised into three thematic sections examining three domains of police violence (custodial, everyday, militarised), followed by reflective interviews, the book mobilises broader political conversations about redress and reform. The contributors include Bhavani Raman, Radha Kumar, Sharib Ali, Ishita Chakrabarty, V. Geetha, Vrinda Grover and Veena Das. The collection reflects an anthropological depth in examining violence as everyday practice, institutional culture, and lived experience, navigating localised ethnographic and socio-political contexts.
Moving beyond a legalistic approach, the book treats violence as an analytical category. It interrogates the political economy and the ideological interplay that legitimise, even celebrate, everyday police violence. In a state of permissive lawlessness under the guise of national security, promotion procedures within the police force serve to incentivise violent outcomes to enforce a political order, not balance the scales of justice. In this paradigm, even the most banal interactions—document verification, street policing—can escalate into sites of extraordinary force, particularly against Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, women, and sexual minorities. Case studies, including the custodial deaths of Jeyaraj and Bennix in Tamil Nadu and Faizan in Delhi, demonstrate the routinisation of such brutality, with caste, religion and class marking the bodies most vulnerable to State violence.
One of the volume’s key contributions is its insistence on grounded theory-making. Rather than relying on frameworks borrowed from the Global North, the text offers empirically grounded insights specific to India’s historical and socio-political context. For instance, the chapters by Ather Zia on Kashmir and Shalini Gera on Chhattisgarh illustrate how militarised policing blurs the lines between war and law enforcement, rendering peace a perpetual state of exception. Violence becomes routine and constitutive — constructing geographies like the Northeast and Bastar in both legal discourse and public consciousness where consent is manufactured and repression normalised.
Importantly, the volume foregrounds the negotiation of power among various actors tasked with exercising State authority. It demonstrates how impunity is not an aberration but a deliberate governance device. In highlighting the dehumanisation of both victims and low-ranking police personnel, the book asserts that any conversation about reform must include the political will to demilitarise civilian policing. Urgent and unflinching, Policing and Violence in India not only diagnoses a systemic malaise but also insists that we imagine its dismantling. It is essential reading for anyone invested in the future of democracy, justice, and State accountability in India.