Police Constables in Colonial India: From Subaltern Studies to Labour and Life History

The study of police constables in colonial India was pioneered by David Arnold in his path-breaking essay on the constabulary in Madras presidency. However, the location of the police constable in the colonial social formation was always a test case for the framework of Subaltern Studies, yielding an ambiguous figure neither entirely in the realm of power nor of subordination. This chapter explores the utility of the category of “the subaltern” for the study of police constabulary, arguing that it induces historians to search the archive for traces of power and subordination in a balance-sheet of marginality, a strategy that reveals the ill-fitting nature of the conceptual framework rather than the structure of the labour form that is police work. Instead, this chapter asserts the value of studying constabulary workers, not only in the moment of policing work, but also in their quest for work in a labour market that shaped their trajectory towards enlistment in the bottom rungs of the colonial police. Methods of labour history and life history are deployed to analyse the trajectory of Ramanand Tiwari, the famous socialist constabulary labour leader from Bihar, who led police strikes on the eve of Indian independence.