Police Matters is a rich and tremendously insightful analysis of policing in colonial and post-colonial India. An examination of the presence of police in rural Tamil Nadu, the book illuminates the precise techniques through which police drew upon and upheld caste dominance. In doing so it shows that contrary to the common perception that caste politics in rural areas proliferate due to the absence of the State, not only is the State a close presence in the countryside but one that is actively informed by the caste system. While Police Matters contributes to a vital body of research on policing in India, it will surely also be of interest to audiences with interests in discipline, the maintenance of social control, and the co-construction of subject, society, and State in everyday life. The book's primary source material, that is, narrative station records maintained by the police from 1922 onwards, is one of its greatest strengths. Indeed, the survival of such granular records, created by and for police from lower ranks, is fortuitous, as records of quotidian life are rarely considered important enough to warrant special care or preservation.
Police Matters opens with an examination of the boundaries and constraints of policing. Kumar skillfully exposes how the allocation of policing resources, particularly in terms of the delineation of station jurisdiction and surveillance time, was rationalized based on predetermined “knowledge” of caste and community. The following chapter extends scholarship on documentation and the State and examines malicious filings of spurious complaints, an issue that is a source of much bureaucratic and public anxiety. Highlighting the conceptual difficulties of delineating false complaints and parsing the number of complaints that police refused to register, Kumar argues that creating police documentation as well as calling them into question reflects the “value of police documents in the shifting relationship of power” (p. 69). The findings discussed in the second chapter also underscore how caste positions are constantly if incrementally, being negotiated through attempts to direct the power of the State.
Chapter Three takes a deep dive into the issue of police coercion and violence. Unsurprisingly, it contains very concerning accounts that describe or allude to the torture of detainees. Through these, Kumar shows how casteism violently intersects with police violence to such an extensive degree that it becomes impossible for victims to escape torture without endangering their families. She also focuses on the aspects of such cases that were considered to be unexceptional, making the vital argument that incidents of custodial violence are not outliers that occur due to the failings of individual police personnel; rather, they are “one end of a continuum of excess violence” that the modern state enacted on marginalized populations—in colonial and postcolonial India alike” (p. 16). While it is not the primary focus of the book, this argument can be developed further by considering the impact of custodial violence from the perspective of the victims' families and communities in greater detail. For example, Kumar reads the lack of involvement of female family members in investigations of custodial death as a lack of access to public spaces. A more detailed articulation of this silence examines it in the context of the shameful history of upper caste men's perpetration of brutal violence upon Dalit women who sought justice.
The second part of the book concerns the policing of political movements. Consequently, the chapters in this section are more sharply focused on the specific period they examine. Together, the chapters present an incisive analysis of the continuities and disjunctures between the colonial and post-colonial periods. Chapter Four traces the ability of colonial administration to hinder popular protests by deploying armed police and troops, as well as levying punitive police taxes on dissenting populations. It also notes that the misrepresentation of public protests over long-standing concerns as riots that were irrational, spontaneous, and violent was a critical sleight of hand that was necessary to justify the use of armed violence against public assemblies. Chapter Five builds on this, showing how the use of such practices reduced in frequency after Independence as their occurrence eroded the legitimacy of the State. Kumar cautions that this decline did not indicate a radical departure from colonial policing and underscores the post-colonial Indian State's continued use of exceptional provisions to suspend rights, and placement of opposition leaders under preventive detention.
Throughout the book, Kumar emphasizes the attempts by different caste groups to channel the power of the State as means to establish dominance. Policing is thus revealed to be a site of contestation, rather than one characterized by stasis. Arguably, the most valuable contributions in Police Matters, however, are its insights into the manufacture of “knowledge” of individuals, communities, and society and the subsequent rationalization of unjust unevenness in police procedures. This not only provides the basis for Kumar's searing indictment of the nature of policing in India, but also opens the possibility of making an abolitionist critique of the policing system itself in the light of the evidence that its fundamental purpose is to uphold grossly inequitable social structures.
