Deana Heath, "Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Deana Heath, "Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India"
Date: October 26, 2025
Host: Roland Clark
Guest: Deana Heath, Professor of Indian and Colonial History, University of Liverpool; author of Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2021)

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between Roland Clark and Deana Heath about her groundbreaking book, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India. Heath challenges the prevailing narrative that British rule in India was relatively benign, arguing instead that terror and state violence—including systematic torture—were central to British colonial governance. The discussion explores how exceptional legal powers, biopolitics (such as the management of famines), and corrupt policing formed a regime of fear that has left a continued legacy in India’s contemporary justice system.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Central Thesis: Terror as Instrument of Colonial Rule

• Heath asserts that terror—not just violence, but systemic, legitimized extralegal violence—was fundamental to British rule in India.
  • “The British established what I call a regime of exception in India...marked both by exceptional laws and the legitimization of extralegal violence…” – Deana Heath [02:18]
• Terror targeted primarily the poor, lower castes, religious minorities, and increasingly middle-class Indians with the rise of nationalist movements.

2. Comparison: British Colonial Violence vs. Mughal Rule

• British governance was markedly more totalizing and violent compared to previous empires, such as the Mughal.
  • Mughals left "gaps" that allowed Indian traditions to persist; the British sought to impose a “more totalizing form of power” and legal system that criminalized many more actions.
  • “The British were not an indigenous force: they were sent in India to exploit it. They didn’t indigenize themselves, the Mughals did.” – Deana Heath [05:39]

3. The “Regime of Exception” and Policing

• Drawing on theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Heath describes how the British invoked both legal and extralegal powers—creating a “regime of exception.”
  • Extraordinary legal powers enabled police to act as “petty sovereigns” wielding unchecked violence.
  • “Exceptional measures…coexisted with other forms of exception,” giving Indian police wide latitude to commit violence on behalf of the colonial state. – Deana Heath [06:43]

4. Famine as Biopolitics

• British policy during famines reflected biopolitical reasoning: the deaths of “residual poor” were rationalized as beneficial.
  • “This seemingly nonsensical idea was the result of…biopolitical ideas. So…those who died were the residual poor who were a drain on both state and society...it was in Britain’s interest for these so-called residual poor die in famines.” – Deana Heath [08:00]

5. Torture as a Tool of Government

• Torture was routine, normalized, and central to police work.
  • “Torture was central to the operation of policing in colonial India and legitimated through its legal system…at the heart of the terror the Indian police and by extension the colonial state evoked…” – Deana Heath [10:01]
• Used less to extract valuable information than to elicit confessions and maintain fear and compliance.

6. British Responsibility for Indian-on-Indian Violence

• Although Indian police did most of the torturing, the British created, maintained, and benefited from the violent system.
  • “The British were responsible for the torture because it was essentially their policing system…they accorded Indians tremendous power to enact violence on their behalf…” – Deana Heath [10:56]
• British authorities repeatedly investigated and denounced police violence, but made no structural reforms.

7. Incentives and Police Behavior

• Policemen were evaluated by convictions, not justice, which fueled coercive tactics and torture.
  • “Their method was to go to a village...round up...troublemakers or even an entire village and put these under various forms of violence and other duress until they secured confession.” – Deana Heath [13:46]
• Illiteracy, inadequate training, and abysmally low pay led police to collude with elites, rely on confession-based convictions, and engage in bribery.

8. The Role of Judges and Legal System Dysfunction

• Judges (both British and Indian) were often inadequately trained, sometimes more ignorant of the law than policemen.
  • “Most British judges…were catapulted from other branches of the colonial state onto the bench and often had very little in the way of legal training…a widespread sentiment that it didn’t really matter who was convicted as long as justice was seen to be done. So this meant…accepting evidence obtained through torture…” – Deana Heath [16:28]

9. Social Position & Views of the Police

• Police were widely feared by the marginalized and lower castes, but embraced by elites who used them as enforcers.
  • “How the police were viewed depended a lot on social position...local elites certainly would view them well because they could use the police to their own ends. They were definitely feared by the lower castes and classes and religious minorities and women…” – Deana Heath [22:44]

10. Endurance of Colonial Policing Legacies

• Colonial policing practices and legal structures have outlasted the British Empire—continuing to shape contemporary Indian policing and state violence.
  • “The issues it addresses...continued into the 20th century and in fact still plague India today…All of the legal issues that I explore in the book pretty much in you.” – Deana Heath [24:30]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On colonial governance:
  • “British rule has got off the hook in India far too much.” – Deana Heath [02:18]
• On why torture persisted:
  • “They weren’t willing to make the changes that would have curbed the enactment of police violence. Even things like the wages that police constables were paid weren’t enough...Such violence ultimately benefited them.” – Deana Heath [12:42]
• On the ongoing legacy:
  • “The legal system, the laws, the policing system...were developed in colonial India, and they actually haven’t changed a lot since then. So it’s not surprising that these problems will continue.” – Deana Heath [25:58]
• On constructing torturers:
  • “Torturers are constructed and they’re constructed by systems...people are not born evil.” – Deana Heath [19:17]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:18] – Challenging the myth of benign British colonialism; introducing the "regime of exception"
• [04:04] – Contrasting Mughal and British rule; totalizing power and state violence
• [06:43] – Defining "regime of exception" and its operation in colonial police practice
• [08:00] – Biopolitics, famine, “let die” policies, and the economics of population management
• [10:01] – The centrality and normalization of torture in colonial policing
• [10:56] – British responsibility for police violence, despite Indian participation
• [13:46] – Incentives for confessions: training, illiteracy, and the economics of policing
• [16:28] – The inadequacy of the colonial legal and judicial systems
• [19:17] – How conditions and systems create torturers
• [22:44] – Societal perceptions of police; collaboration between police and elites
• [24:30] – Continuity of violence and policing structures into contemporary India

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Conclusion

This episode compellingly demonstrates that systemic violence, particularly through torture and coercive policing, was not an aberrant aspect but an operational cornerstone of British colonial rule in India. Heath’s research reveals the mechanics of fear, legal exception, and complicity that underpinned colonial statecraft and exposes the long, troubling legacy of these structures in present-day India.

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For more, see Deana Heath’s Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2021).

Transcript

[Dina Heath]

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[Dina Heath]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Roland Clark]

Cut the camera. They see us.

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[Dina Heath]

Liberty.

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Liberty Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.

[Dina Heath]

Excludes Massachusetts.

[Liberty Mutual Advertiser]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Roland Clark]

My name is Roland Clark, and I'm here today on the New Books Network talking to Dina Heath, who's professor of Indian and colonial history at the University of Liverpool. We're talking about her book Colonial Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, which has just come out in paperback with Oxford University Press. Deana is a scholar of British imperialism and colonialism, with a particular focus on India and the violence of empire and its legacies. Welcome to the program, Dina.

[Dina Heath]

Thank you, Roland. Thanks for having me, Dina.

[Roland Clark]

This book argues that, and I quote, terror was central to the operation of colonial systems of rule in India, where the book set who was doing the terror and against what source of people.

[Dina Heath]

Okay, this is a good question to start with. So what I'll do is I'll start by saying what the book tries to do, which is challenge the notion that British rule in India was relatively benign and nonviolent, at least in comparison to other colonial contexts in the British and other European empires. I think basically British rule has gone off the hook in India far too much. So what it tries to do, what it argues, is that the British established what I call a regime of exception in India. And it draws upon the work of scholars like Georgia Gamben on states of exception and Diri Afasan sovereignty and Michel Fakar governmentality. And what the book argues is that this regime was marked both by exceptional laws and the legitimization of extralegal violence and by the according of powers to the Indian police that enabled them to act as petty sovereigns who commit extralegal violence. So the terror I'm referring to then is the terror of extra legal violence, its legitimization and its ubiquity, which generated a climate of fear of the Indian police in India and in many ways of the colonial state more widely, at least for the poor, marginal sections of Indian society. So I'm talking here about the lower castes, religious minorities and so on. Although in fact middle class Indians began to face such fear by the early 20th century because of British attempts to suppress the Indian national movement, which encompass.

[Roland Clark]

The Indian middle class, the empire's empires. Right. So like India had been ruled by the Mughal empire for almost 300 years. How was British rule different to that?

[Dina Heath]

Yes, that's a good question. What were the genealogies of the issues that I'm talking about? How did they differ from the Mughal Empire, Britain's predecessor? I do take some pains in the book to think about the genealogies of the torture and other forms of state violence were colonizes because you're right, another empire preceded that, Britain's, namely the Mughal. And of course, Britain wasn't even the only colonial power in India. And there were other regional powers like the Marathas, and all of these were of course violent, but they enacted such violence in different ways because they were very different types of entities. So we could boil this down by saying the Mughals were inherently an early modern empire and the British were a modern one. So the difference between the two lies in many ways in relation to the nature of their states and how they enacted power. So the British saw a more totalizing form of power, which they endeavored to realize through a more totalizing state. Rabindranath Tagore, who was a renowned writer, Nobel laureate, educator, anti nationalist and way more all of that, he put this well when he compared the Mughal empire to a handloom which he said left Big gaps to which Indian life sent its threads and imposed its designs. What he meant was that it allowed India to maintain its own identity and continue its traditions. And the British Empire he compared to Paulom, which prioritized organized power over influence, individual freedom. So the British imported the modern system of policing that they developed first in Britain and then transformed in Ireland. India, this was a semi militarized policing system with far greater powers to those of you. When it came to policing in Mughal India, they also completely transformed the legal system in the process endlessly multiplying the number of offenses, including for things like the death penalty. There are only five reasons you could get the death penalty in Mughal India. The British multiplied this greatly. They saw that as a sign of weakness, or as they put it all in. And of course, the British were not armed force. They were sent in India to exploit it. They didn't indigenize themselves, the Mughals did. And they shaped the system of governance they established. So the upshot of all of this was that the British regime, on the whole, more violent than that.

[Roland Clark]

You talk in the book about the British ruling through a state of exception. What does that mean?

[Dina Heath]

So I have already mentioned too, I've come up with a new concept, not sure how this will fly beyond the book. We'll see, which I've called a regime of exception, as I mentioned, because I see two different forms of exceptionality operating in coloniality. And one of them, yes, was a state of acceptance. And that's a theoretical concept that describes a situation where sovereign government assumes extraordinary powers by suspending the normal rule of law during a real crisis. And this allows a state to take actions that would otherwise be illegal by bypassing physical legal constraints. And the rationale for this is it's to restore order or ensure state survival of that sort of thing. So in India, then, that those exceptional measures, I argue in the book coexisted with other forms of exception. And this meant giving extraordinary powers to their police force to enact what was in essence, largely extralegal violence on their behalf.

[Roland Clark]

One of the things you talk about is how famines were used as a form of biopolitics. Why was it in the interest of the British Empire for Indians to die in famines? Like surely they would want to keep their subjects alive.

[Dina Heath]

This ties into the point I was making about why British rule was, on the whole, more violent than that of Mughal rule. And it relates to attitudes towards Indians and the role of the British in India. So if we look at famines, India witnessed some really horrific famines. Under British rule in the late 19th century, in which, according to some estimates, as many as 60 million people died. And this was largely because of a laissez faire attitude that it was in Indians self interest for them to die. And this, this seemingly nonsensical idea was the result of the implication of biopolitical ideas. So this is Foucault's idea about who should be, as he put it, let live or who should be let by for the larger welfare of a population. And these ideas were imported from Ireland, which was the genesis much British colonial thinking and experimentation. So the thinking with famines was that those who died were the residual poor who were a drain on both state and society and both would be better off without them. So it was on the whole in Britain's interest for these so called residual poor die in famines rather than for the state to have to support a surplus population. For me, all of these issues, the book is about policing state violence, in particular torture. But none of that can be understood or the rationales behind that without understanding the larger structures, systems, rationales of colonial.

[Roland Clark]

Violence and the way that they thought of India as surplus population. Yeah, torture is the other thing that's at heart of this book. I've always thought of torture as a way of extracting information from a captured soldier or you're destroying someone's personhood. But how can torture be used to govern a population?

[Dina Heath]

Yeah, this is an interesting question and it goes back to the point made about PERA and how it operated in colonial India. Now, torture was central to the operation of policing in colonial India and legitimated through its legal system. So in other words, it was ubiquitous and it was quotidian. It was then at the heart of the terror the Indian police and by extension the colonial state evoked in India. Torture was also key to the ways in which the Indian police were socialized and the group dynamics through which they operated. So in other words, it permeated both society and a key apparatus of the colonial state.

[Roland Clark]

Let's come back to the fact that it was the Indian police who were doing the torturing, not the British people. To what extent were the British ultimately responsible for the fact that Indians were torturing Indians?

[Dina Heath]

You are right, it was largely Indians doing the torturing. Although I have come across cases in which British police officers were directly involved. I think we could say that the British were responsible for the torture because it was essentially their policing system, because their regime was a colonial one, which meant that the British lived in a perpetual state of fear about the security of their rule. They largely distrusted Indians. And of course, the racist foundations of their rule considerably compounded that. But one of the ironies of this situation is despite that distrust, they accorded Indians tremendous power to enact violent on their behalf, even though they were. They were actually also terrified of letting loose what I call their violent workers because they couldn't turn against them. But the British, of course, could never admit this to themselves, but, you know, they were the source of such violence. I talk a lot in the book about dates of denial that make colonials possible. And this state of denial made it possible for them to justify the rationale for their rule of India as being for India's own welfare. In other words, the argument went, well, if we weren't here, if we were to leave, that argument increases in the 20th century. If we were to pack up and go home, Indians would just jack each other, you know, they would just go at each other. So the British could say, we're here to protect you from yourselves. We're not the source of this violence, you are, and we're trying to put a stop to it. We're benign rulers here, completely disinterestedly, that's the reason we're here.

[Roland Clark]

But in fact, it was the British that set up the whole system and created the virus first class.

[Dina Heath]

And what's striking, which the book focuses on a lot, is the emnist police commission legal painting brief, parliamentary interventions that are to extensively address the police violence in India. But nothing actually changed, largely because they weren't willing to make the changes that would have curbed the enactment of police violence. Even things like the wages that police constables were paid weren't enough, quite literally, for them to survive on. They weren't willing to raise the pay of constables to the living rage. And I argue that this is because such violence ultimately benefited them.

[Roland Clark]

Yeah, and the amount that policemen are getting paid is quite relevant because you write that the policemen were evaluated purely based on how many convictions they got. And so that impacts promotion and salary. How did the fact that the more promotions you get and the more convictions you get, the better your life is. How does that change their investigative methods and their desire to prevent crime?

[Dina Heath]

Yeah, the impact wasn't very good, as you can imagine. I discussed police training, or the lack of it, quite a bit in the book, as well as legal training, because I think it's important to analyze the two together and make sense of the conditions that made rampant police violence possible in colonial India, and also because these issues continue to plague contemporary India. So I wanted to place their geniality. The upshot is that the police were given hardly any training, investigation methods or crime prevention at all. Some began to be introduced beginning in the late 19th century, but this was completely inadequate. Most police constables, for example, were illiterate and knew little about the law. So when crimes were committed, their method was to go to a village. Most Indians lived in villages largely where they operated a round up either those who local elite identified as troublemakers or even an entire village and put these under various forms of violence and other duress until they secured confession. So as far as the police were concerned, their job was then largely done. These confessions constituted the main and in many cases only form of evidence that the police would submit in their legal cases. And this is even despite the fact that from the 1870s, after the passage of the Indian Evidence act, police confessions were actually inadmissible as evidence in Indian court. So what happened then was that the number of false confessions and from 1872 their inadmissibility in court, with some notable exception, often led to the collapse of police cases, at least in the higher court. So in short, yes, torture severely affects the ability of police to carry out investigations. There's a modern policing and also if.

[Roland Clark]

You, if you need convictions, there's no incentive to stop crime happening in the first place. You want crime to happen so that you can arrest someone, is that right?

[Dina Heath]

Yes, well, yes, they weren't given any training. Crime prevention wasn't the interest. You could have the colonist state, that was way down on its radar, its primary interest was using the police to shore up British rule. And that meant security was the key issue. So crime prevention itself was way down the list of things that they were concerned about.

[Roland Clark]

So you talked about some of these cases being thrown out in the High Court, but in general, how did British judges deal with this? Because if torture lets you get confessions regardless of someone's innocent or not, surely the judges wouldn't have taken that seriously, would they?

[Dina Heath]

The extent to which they took it seriously is an interesting question. And of course we're universalizing here, right, aren't we? We're talking about a regime or a state and there would have been a lot of nuances within that. But I think the fact that the Indian policing and judicial systems were manned by the British because there was also a colonial hierarchy, which I haven't mentioned yet, which meant that the British largely held onto all of the high ranking post in the colonial state. This was one of the rationales that they sometimes gave for denying that Their leasing system was inherently violent. In other words, we're British, we couldn't possibly do this sort of thing. We wouldn't sanction that. But I've already mentioned the board training of daggers. To me, this is a really fascinating and understudied issue, not just in India, but more broadly about the training of judges and the track record of on and how they end up on the bench. So most British judges, or most of most judges, and this include Indians as well, in this system, were catapulted from other branches of the colonial state onto the bench and often had very little in the way of legal training. And both the colonial legal system itself and British judges were discriminatory against. And there was also definitely a widespread sentiment that it didn't really matter who was convicted as long as justice was seen to be gone. So this meant, in essence, accepting evidence obtained through torture, a flawed and discriminatory system of medical jurisprudence and forensics, which British judges saw as the ultimate source of proof in faith feud. Indian witnesses, largely liars, contributed to the.

[Roland Clark]

So what really matters to a certain extent is that the British judges didn't know what they were doing either, and maybe even they're learning from the policemen, because the policemen know the law better than the judge does.

[Dina Heath]

In some cases, they would learn from their Indian subordinates. So Akshaya talk a lot about this in the book. They were the ones really running the show. This is where that issue, that question of where the power actually lay in this system, what was to what extent were the British responsible? They were responsible because it was their system. But actually, in terms of who was pulling the shots lower down the system, it was definitely Indian because they had knowledge that the British simply lacked from everything, from culture, customs, the law, and of course, languages.

[Roland Clark]

It makes sense to me that the people who were evaluated based on the number of confessions they got might have had an incentive to use torture. But still, torture's a pretty big step to take. What was it about the sorts of people who become policemen and the conditions that they work in that make them become torturers?

[Dina Heath]

Yes, I like it that you phrase this in terms of what made them into torturers, because when we think about extreme forms of violence, we often think that people are inherently sadistic or that somehow people are born evil. Right. This is the very unnuanced understanding of evil that, well, certainly perpet much popular culture. But cultures are made, they are not born. And in fact, it doesn't benefit state that is really fearful about its security who have men in its systems whose we're talking about men here doing adultery who are sadistic or inherently enough tough. Absolutely. Certain issues that make them inherently violent. So torturers are constructed and they're constructed by system. So to make sense of this, I look in the book a lot at the conditions of employment of the Indian police. We've already mentioned their pay and pay, but the working conditions were equally dire. I think we cannot underestimate that issue of pay because literally until into the 20th century, the lowest rugs of the Indian police were not paid enough to survive and support families and so on. And they were gouged for all sorts of expenses. The number of people who fled the jobs. In any given year, half a police force could flee. I mean, the conditions were dire. So the people who ended up in the police in the lower rank did show for two reasons. One, they had no other options. Actually, you could earn more as a day laborer than you could have least until into the 20th century in India in certain provinces. And it was either that they had no other options or they wanted to use the system for their own benefits. And in fact, they had to do that in order to survive. So this meant allying with local elite and essentially enacting violence on their behalf. So the colonial state in India, as in all colonial contexts, had to share sovereignty, indigenous leaders. So these lower ranking police officers then would be at the beck and call of two different systems, two different patriarchy, two different norms, so on. And that led in many cases to them an act of violence. But also things like bribery and corruption were integral to this system, partly because of the dire working conditions. So this all gets wrapped up in the rationale for violence. Things like group norms and the way they operate that serve to institutionalize torture. But in India, we also can't avoid issues like caste norms, which played a big role in perpetuating police violence. You could see that play out in different regions of India, different times, depending on the makeup of the local, the lower ranks of the police and who they were targeting for violence. It would be lower caste or, you know, if there were caste rivalries, that sort of thing, other castes would bear the brunt of that.

[Roland Clark]

So how did most Indian people see the police? Were they were policemen seen as people had sold out to the British or was there more to it?

[Dina Heath]

That is a very interesting question that needs more research. I've actually got kids, these two started a project on this question for Bengal, how they were viewed. Because this is a big, big issue, isn't it? In order to be effective, police has to be viewed by at least a certain segment of the population in the positive way. Now, the fact that the Indian police had to rely on terror to operate would imply two things. One, that they didn't enjoy widespread popularity. Right. And that a lot of people feared them. So that would largely be among mentioned marginal groups in Indian society. So how the police were viewed depended a lot on social position. So local elites certainly would view them well because they could use the police to their own ends. They were definitely feared by the lower caste and classes and religious minorities and women because sexual violence was rife, enacted by the police against both men and women. But upper castes and classes came to see them as a very useful tool. Still the case in contemporary India, because you could call upon them, you could, you could, you know, a neighbor's causing you trouble, you can get the police in too, to sort out for you extralegally. So a bit of a mixed bag. And it's a fact that, the fact that the higher caste and classes do this, this gets back to the issue of shared sovereignty and how that helped them to buy into the colonial regime because they could use aspects of its power and systems to their own end.

[Roland Clark]

How long did all this go on for? Is this like just a 19th century thing?

[Dina Heath]

No, I mean, the book spans quite a wide period. It does concentrate a lot on the 19th century, but actually goes back to the 18th and into the 20th. It definitely wasn't a 19th century. One of the reasons, actually I wanted to write this book, as I mentioned previously, is because the issues it addresses in relation to the policing and judicial systems in colonial India continued into the 20th century and in fact still plague India today. I mean, the, this is the gist of Amnesty reports and other human rights organizations, Commonwealth organization, that, that really worked hard on policing in India. The violence is life deaths in judicial custody. I mean, the statistics on that are really horrendous. All of the legal issues that I explore in the book pretty much in you. So, yeah, it wasn't a 19th century phenomenon. In fact, I recently co edited a book that addresses these contemporary legacies called Policing Violence in India with a renowned scholar of policing and violence in post colonial India, Geni Lokonita. So, yes, we very much wanted to carry in, carry on some of the things that I've looked at into the postcolonial era.

[Roland Clark]

And all of that is really grounded in the experience of British colonial rule.

[Dina Heath]

Well, yes, I mean, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot on this in the Indian case about the legal system, the laws the policing system. They all were developed in colonial India, and they actually haven't changed a lot since then. So it's not surprising that these problems will continue.

[Roland Clark]

Well, that's about all we have time for today, but thank you so much for sharing this really fascinating story with.

[Dina Heath]

Us, and thank you very much for talking with me about the book.