Exploring violent confrontation between the state and the population in colonial and postcolonial India, this book is both a study of the many techniques of colonial coercion and state violence and a cultural history of the different ways in which Indians imbued practices of punishment with their own meanings and reinterpreted acts of state violence in their own political campaigns.

This work examines state violence from a historical perspective, expanding the study of punishment beyond the prison by investigating the interplay between imprisonment, corporal punishment, collective...

This book explores the shift from colonial rule to independence in India and Pakistan, with the aim of unravelling the explicit meaning and relevance of 'independence' for the new citizens of India and Pakistan during the two decades post 1947. While the study of postcolonial South Asia has blossomed in recent years, this volume addresses a number of imbalances in this dynamic and highly popular field. Firstly, the histories of India and Pakistan after 1947 have been conceived separately, with many scholars assuming that the two states developed along divergent paths after independence. Thus,...