Seeing Like an Empire: The Hermeneutics of Force and Insurgent Epistemologies in Colonial India

• In Event: Violence and Security Assemblages in Urban Environments

Abstract

This paper examines the knowledges and technologies of (counter-)insurgency in British India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While many apprehend the ‘insurgent’ world-making powers of British colonial technoscience through its techniques for forcefully imposing ways of knowing and being, I argue that we must also discern, in addition to the contest *of* forces proper to counterinsurgency, a range of imbricated contests *about* forces: which forces compose the world and how. I suggest that a constructivist, actor-network-inspired account of maneuvering and ‘combat’ around epistemic controversies offers much for grasping the ontological dimensions of forceful and violent (counter-)insurgencies—conflicts typically not characterized epistemologically. To better interrogate the categories of conflict and contestation, I track how actors articulate the relations of forces and the spatial and temporal scales of two (discrete?) insurgencies. By coupling archived communications and reports from the British War Office and the India Office with readings of insurgent epistemologies, this paper explores how different, often paranoid, reading and writing practices virtually construe the field of contest, sometimes finding recourse in sedimented modes of explanation and prediction through genre conventions from the natural sciences, and sometimes anxiously conjuring threats proleptically. The paper moves to analyze communications infrastructures around two insurgencies, assaying the affordances and vulnerabilities of the kinds of connectivity offered by the telegraph, the post, and potent conspiratorial folk ‘rumor’ circulation. I close by considering the prophetic ways of knowing of sannyasi and fakir ascetic rebels as cultivating a counter-hegemonic epistemology attuned to other forces and futurities.

Author

• Anooj Kansara, PhD Candidate, Rhetoric Department, UC Berkeley