Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.

As a pervasive and relatively modernized element of Indian society, the police are potentially a powerful vanguard in the establishment of a stable democratic process and a major factor in public attitudes toward the government. Professor Bayley's book, based upon 3,600 interviews during two extended periods of research in India, explores in depth the formative role police play in the maintenance and development of the Indian political system. As a first study of police and political development in a relatively non-modernized country, this book will be a guide for the exploration of a topic critical in the political life of many nations, both developed and underdeveloped. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Increasing political violence in India is challenging the government’s ability to resolve conflicts democratically. In this topical book, K S Subramanian: - identifies patterns and trends in political violence in India; - examines how the government’s political machinery has responded; - explains why State response has been inadequate; and - recommends changes in structures and attitudes. The author sketches the growing crisis of governance by assessing the Central and state governments’ police organisations, especially key central agencies such as the Intelligence Bureau, the Central Paramilitary Forces and the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. In case studies of regions and communities affected by political violence, he takes the reader behind the scenes—whether it is on police partisanship in the communal pogrom in Gujarat, the official approach to the Naxalite problem, the violence against dalits and adivasis, or the violation of human rights in northeast India. With police reform being a major public concern, police research is gaining importance as a field of study. This book will appeal to students of criminal justice, political science, sociology, public policy and public administration, as well as policy makers, police and administrative officers, and human rights activists.

Police Matters moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows. Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.