home tickets: (from L to R) Lennie Lott, Radha Kumar, Mel Stanley, Loma hyder. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society. 197 hours making crafts, served 82 meals, and hosted 96 special events. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture-the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing-discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike.
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