Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2022 Distinguished Book Award, Asian Law Society.

Overview

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty.Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

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9780198951612

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Reviews

This well researched and historically informed book is a novel contribution to the existing literature on state violence and police torture in colonial India as well as Indian colonial history. * Prashant Maurya, South Asia Research * Surpassing the study of torture alone, Heath explores here the broader assemblage of colonial terror, enacted upon and explored through Indian bodies. These acts are situated through the compacts between facilitators, systems (policing and legal), and perpetrators. In doing so, Heath brilliantly creates ways for us to contemplate these unrepresentable spaces of terror. * Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham * This fascinating book is a landmark study that, as the first systematic analysis of the infrastructure of torture and state violence in colonial India, also helps us understand state violence in postcolonial India. Heath Brilliantly traces the technologies of violence in colonial governance and bureaucracy that kept colonial rule in place and chillingly explains how the routine violence actually ""undid worlds"" and ""destroyed souls"" * Jinee Lokaneeta, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Drew University *

Author Information

Deana Heath received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and has since held academic posts in four countries: the United States, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, she has been the beneficiary of grants from numerous national and international funding bodies, including the Independent Social Research Foundation, The Indian Council for Cultural Relations, The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Fulbright Scholar Programme. She is currently Chair of Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool.

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