Closing Keynote: 'The Law of Violence and the Violence of the Law' in the time of Insurrection

In early 1830, a massive peasant insurrection broke out in the Princely State of Mysore. It took close to four years to bring the insurrection to an uneasy end. By this time, it had also spread across the border to the territories ruled directly by the East India Company.

At first armed with mere slings and stones, the peasant rebels were, by December 1830, fully armed and entrenched in fortresses across the northern regions of Mysore. Nothing less than a full-fledged assault by the Mysore troops at first, aided later by EIC troops brought the rebels to accept defeat.

The peasant war was marked by three different kinds of violence, which allow the historian to pose interesting questions about the place of law in the time of insurrection. At first, was the violence of the enraged peasants, particularly against their immediate oppressors, the Faujdars, Amildars, Serishtadars, who coincidentally were nearly always Brahmins. This ranged from forms of humiliation to physical violence. The second form of violence was that inflicted by the upholders of law itself, namely the Mysore state, which included forms of mutilation sanctioned by customary tradition and summary codes of enquiry. The third and perhaps most meticulously documented violence was that of the East India Company. Both the Court Martials that were organized against errant sepoys, and the detailed and exhaustive enquiries that preceded corporeal punishment or incarceration allow the historian an insight into the legally sanctioned violence of the state that was at the heart of colonial ‘rule of law’.