Book Review: Police matters: the everyday state and caste politics in South India, 1900–1975, by Radha Kumar

This book explores the role of state policing in shaping caste politics in the Tamil countryside from 1900 to 1975. Using the archival records preserved in rural police stations, the author argues that policing as a coercive instrument of state power produced and deployed knowledge of caste in its interactions with subject-citizens through routine police procedures and controlling popular politics. Police violence, either directed to maintain public order or used inside police stations illegally, manifested the conjunction of state power and caste authority, and was largely directed towards suppressing marginalised subjects. The author captures the continuity of police violence transitioning from the colonial to postcolonial state and its responses to changes in caste, class and political configurations.

The author argues that to effectively monitor the countryside for smooth functioning of the rural economy, local police created a ‘hierarchy of spaces’, mapping the village based on castes and their resources that guided them regarding specific communities, geographies and times that needed surveillance. Lower castes like Koravars, Maravars and Kallars are criminalised and landed mercantile castes like Chettiars and Nadars received protection from the police. The residential areas of lower castes are subjected to routine police beats, and they are kept under constant watch. The problem of ‘False Cases’, denoting either creating record of crime when it never occurred or declaring crimes that occurred as unfit for investigation strengthened the sovereign power of police over subjects. Upper castes that commanded power in the village could frame marginalised people in false cases. In the postcolonial India, casted village heads and representatives of political parties used their influence to by file false cases against their opponents to maintain status quo.

In investigating crimes, police often resorted to excessive torture in the disguise of getting information from the criminals. It is argued in this book that the torture, which sometimes leads to custodial death is directed against the bodies of marginalised people. It exemplifies inequality of power between state and suspects, and the usage of police power to intimidate lower caste men and women. The invisibility of happenings inside the police station to the public eye and the judiciary’s bias against the subaltern subjects facilitated the exoneration of police in cases of custodial violence.

Popular politics of the streets unveiled a new confrontational terrain for caste politics and police violence in colonial Madras. In enforcing criminal legal provisions, it is argued that colonial police dictated modes of public participation that varied across communities. By necessitating paying for the police licence to hold public ceremonies, the state limited the public space for those who can pay and obtain permission. The police were authorised to make preventive detentions and levy punitive taxes. These measures, instead of silencing the marginalised castes, sparked agitation and mobilised public politics. After Independence, political parties in Madras state mobilised caste-based coalitions to negotiate with police authority. This enabled lower castes to consolidate their identities by claiming political stake through electoral strength and actively engaging in politics of the street to negotiate with state violence against them.

This work theories the ways police framed definitions of criminality based on knowledge of caste to make rural subjects legible to state and deployed violence against subaltern subjects to maintain casted order in the villages. Through extensive fieldwork and scrutinising of unexplored documents collected in police stations, Radha Kumar explored the rise of popular politics in the countryside as a response to state policing and demonstrated the usefulness of station records in understanding the casted police gaze and shifting power dynamics between castes in the villages. Covering both colonial and postcolonial periods leading to emergency in India, this book makes a valuable contribution to the study of the intersection of caste politics and state policing in India.

Originally published in Contemporary South Asia

Reference: Police matters: the everyday state and caste politics in South India, 1900–1975, by Radha Kumar, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2021, 264 pp., ISBN: 978-1-5017-6086-0, $19.95 (paperback)