Ordering Imperial Spaces: Violence and Railway Journeys in Colonial India

• In Event: Colonial Spaces and Cultural Production in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

My proposed paper aims to re-appraise our understanding of construction of imperial ‘spaces’ through the illustrative example of violence and atrocities against Indian railway passengers in colonial India. This analysis also contributes to a wider theme of role of violence in maintaining social order in colonial societies.
Historiographically, violence against Indian railway passengers have been hitherto analysed primarily through the prism of race. Furthermore, such examinations have largely focussed on third class passengers.
But my proposed paper suggests a radical historiographical departure. In this paper, I claim that the violence experienced by Indian railway passengers cannot be explained merely in racial terms. More importantly, I argue that the pervasiveness of the atrocities committed, is suggestive of an ‘imperial logic’ which can be better explained by an aspiration inherent in colonial structures to control and command persons, spaces and institutions.
Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s idea that infrastructure such as railways are materialisations of social relations in space, I suggest that the violence against Indian railway passengers was reflective of a desire of the colonial state to contest and claim new social and imperial spaces - in this instance, the railway properties.
By bringing in new evidence from hitherto unused railway crimes archive, my paper offers a fresh perspective to our historiographical assumptions about role of violence in colonial control.
Dr. Aparajita Mukhopadhyay
Salisbury University (MD) USA

Author

• Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Salisbury University