How has torture been deployed as a technology for the management of racialized others? How do we understand the operation of torture in a colonial context such as India in which the torturers were themselves colonized and hence subjugated others? This project will bring two disparate literatures together, namely scholarship on violence in colonial India with sociological research on violence, to consider the connections between forms of violence that are overt and perpetrated by identifiable agents – such as torture – and structural forms of violence in which the effects are not always visible and there are no clear perpetrators. It focuses, firstly, on the torturers themselves, who while agents of violence were also victims of it, since they generally came from the lowest social and economic strata of Indian society – from the strata most affected, in other words, by the structural violence of colonialism.

But this project also concentrates on the ways in which torture was systematized as a technology of colonial rule. As in the case of the neo-imperial states responsible for erecting torture regimes as part of the ‘war on terror’, the colonial Indian state, rather than acknowledging its own constitutive violence and the utility of torture in making it what Achille Mbembe terms a ‘terror formation’ (Mbembe 2003), displaced blame either onto rogue individuals or, more commonly, its victims, whose alleged lack of civility justified the civilizing mission of colonialism. The key innovation of this project is therefore to reassess torture in a colonial context such as India not as an aberrant aspect of a liberal system of rule, but as symptomatic of the broader structural ‘civilizing’ violence of colonialism. It is its elucidation of some of the genealogies of neo-liberal torture regimes and how they operate that make this project of particular contemporary relevance.