Policing knowledge: surveillance in Colonial Bengal, 1861 to 1913

Abstract

The present study investigates the portion of colonial Bengal’s policing infrastructure that developed according to a surveillance epistemology between 1861 and 1913. It introduces the idea that a primary consideration of those who took charge of the new police was that public order could be secured via covert and distant police power. In Bengal, surveillance was used to monitor the movements, habits, and associations of people who the police assumed most likely to commit crime. It required the police to identify particular individuals, to record their habits and movements, and to exercise continual surveillance over them in an effort to reduce crime through preventative policing. This police abstraction can be understood as a by-product of an administrative preference for indirect rule in India, which had produced a small regular police force. Surveillance was a policing strategy viewed as a necessary corollary of a colonial police force whose presence in Bengal was far from pervasive. A police force with a limited presence across the territory could at least target areas where crimes were assumed likely to occur and people assumed likely to commit them. Simultaneously, surveillance was aimed at preventing the crimes of individuals who fell into a constructed category of habitual criminality. The nature of crime in Bengal, as the police authorities understood it, gave rise to a belief that police surveillance was an essential policing strategy. A continual police watch that occurred according to carefully classified information was viewed as a means to prevent the apparently inevitable crimes of suspected and actual repeat offenders. By the first decade of the twentieth century, surveillance was a clearly defined policing strategy aimed at preventing recidivism, and at extending limited caches of police power. The significance of a surveillance epistemology is demonstrated through an examination of its impact on three key areas of administrative development. The thesis reveals that surveillance defined the primary technological apparatus utilised by the police over the course of the nineteenth century, and this was made evident by a transformation of the role of written information in everyday policing. It moreover develops the idea that information-based surveillance consolidated the relationship between the enrolled colonial police and the non-enrolled village police, which had been co-opted as an adjunct to a minimally staffed police force in 1870. The third area of analysis is to demonstrate that a project of surveillance informed an ongoing project to reform the supervisory structures over the village police, which had major consequences for the shape of Bengal’s village administrative structure. Such emphasis frames the study as a rejoinder to contemporary Indian police historiography, which has centred narrowly on the political purposes of colonial policing. Recent work on Indian police history that has drawn it into well-established historical discussions about the establishment, maintenance and demise of British power and authority in India, has inadvertently obscured an important bureaucratic and non-political function of surveillance. The study explicates the aspects of colonial policing that had little connection with establishing or maintaining foreign rule and which highlight a desire to establish a conciliatory framework for police administration. Its focus is the small powers of policing; the instrumentations that relied on knowledge and information, rather than coercion and brute force. This is achieved through the use and reformulation of dominant theories of modern and pre-industrial information states, and a subsequent re-evaluation of discourses of knowledge and power that have identified an ‘all-India information order’. The study presents a theory of colonial surveillance that expands the idea of an information order in India to include its hitherto peripheral police context. Overall, this thesis reconsiders dominant assumptions about the purpose and character of colonial policing in India. Through an analysis of the development and importance of preventative surveillance, the Bengal police are shown to have been simultaneously a force for imperial consolidation, and a conciliatory policing body reliant on paperwork; the collection, classification and utilisation of criminal information.