Launch of Deana Heath’s Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India

Our New Books in Perpetrator Studies Series continues on May 26, 2022 at 18.00 CET with a discussion of Deana Heath’s Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2021).

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror examines the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Heath explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, she argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime.

The respondents will be Mayur Suresh, Senior Lecturer in Law at SOAS, and Radha Kumar, Assistant Professor in History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.

The discussion will be moderated by Prof. Nandini Chatterjee (Exeter).

This event will take place online, on Zoom. Please register via this link: https://unibw.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Yuf-GhrDIuEtWLZ96pvPm9EVZp4IfjQvYD

This series is organised by Susanne Knittel and Timothy Williams.