The Ajnala Massacre of 1857 and the Politics of Colonial Violence and Commemoration in Contemporary India

In February 2014, an amateur archaeological team unearthed thousands of bones and other remains from an old well in the town of Ajnala, located in the Indian state of Punjab. These remains are believed to belong to 282 Indian sepoys who were summarily executed en masse on 1 August 1857 under the orders of Deputy Commissioner Frederic Cooper, during the height of the Indian Uprising of 1857. The discovery of the bodies has not only reignited fierce debates about the violent history of the British Empire in India, but also offers an interesting glimpse into some of the ways that Indian history and national identity are currently being remade and negotiated in relation to the colonial past. This article is about the contested historical narrations, memories, and ongoing efforts to commemorate the Ajnala Massacre. It reveals how the history and public memory of colonial violence remain poorly understood, and the ways that calls for the recognition of previously forgotten, absent, or erased memories can prompt difficult and highly politicized discussions about the meaning of history, identity, and politics.</p

COERCION AND CONCILIATION AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE: STATE-BUILDING AND ITS LIMITS IN WAZIRISTAN, 1849–1914

Since 2001, the geo-strategic priorities of the ‘War on Terror’ have prompted renewed attention to the historically significant region of Waziristan. Ironically, given the apparent failure of British attempts to pacify the region in the century after 1849, Waziristan’s colonial history has been picked over by policy-makers, commentators, and scholars for lessons which might be applied to current projects of state-building and counter-insurgency. Unabashedly instrumentalist, these works have reproduced the reductive stereotypes of the colonial sources and helped to entrench partial understandings of the frontier which obscure the dynamic and contingent nature of imperial state-building. This article offers an alternate frame for writing the history of the colonial frontier by re-examining how British officials attempted to constitute colonial authority through their engagements with one of the region’s most powerful groups: the Mahsud Wazirs. Challenging historiographical emphases on oscillating metropolitan strategies, this article maps crucial and largely overlooked continuities in British attempts to pacify the Mahsuds, providing new insights into state-building at the edge of empire and a more nuanced account of how imperial power was engaged, resisted, and deflected by those it sought to control

The Indian ‘Alsatia’:Sovereignty, Extradition, and the Limits of Franco-British Colonial Policing

By the eve of the First World War, the world’s two most powerful imperial powers, Britain and France, had begun to work together in order to defeat the growing menace posed by transnational anti-colonial networks operating within Europe. When it came to the front lines of the anti-colonial struggle, however, Franco-British collaborative policing efforts continued to be plagued by persistent rivalries and contestations between these erstwhile enemies. This is particularly evident in the case of the French-controlled settlement of Chandernagore in India, which was one of the centres of revolutionary activity in Bengal. This article examines how Chandernagore’s unique legal and political status as a French possession enabled it to become a ‘haven’ or ‘Alsatia’ for Indian revolutionaries operating against the British colonial state. It traces how the persistence of this vestige of French sovereignty placed it at the centre of repeated conflicts between British and French colonial authorities over the detection, arrest, and extradition of these revolutionaries, revealing both the possibilities and limitations of colonial police cooperation. Far from being peripheral in nature, these conflicts cut to the heart of even more fiercely contested debates within the imperial metropole about the relationship between national sovereignty and international law in an increasingly global age

The Insecurity State

In this provocative new work, Mark Condos explores the &amp;apos;dark underside&amp;apos; of the ideologies that sustained British rule in India. Using Punjab as a case study, he argues that India&amp;apos;s colonial overlords were obsessively fearful, and plagued by an unreasoning belief in their own vulnerability as rulers. These enduring anxieties precipitated, and justified, an all too frequent recourse to violence, joined with an insistence on untrammelled power placed in the hands of the executive. Examining how the British colonial experience was shaped by a chronic sense of unease, anxiety, and insecurity, this is a timely intervention in debates about the contested project of colonial state-building, the oppressive and violent practices of colonial rule, the nature of imperial sovereignty, law, and policing and the postcolonial legacies of empire.</jats:p

Licence to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the rule of law in colonial India, 1867–1925

AbstractIn 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality.</jats:p