Policing a riot-torn city : Kolkata, 16-18 August 1946

Historical accounts of the Great Calcutta Riots (1946) emphasize their role in making Indian Partitian an inevitable outcome of nationalist-religious politics in colonical India. It is seen as a critical event in the religious wars, conventionally known as the Partition riots of communal riots, in the Indian sub-continent in 1945-47. This article, views the Great Calcutta Killings as a remarkable event in the mutually constitutive relations between the police and the crowd. The police apparatus built by the colonial state was based fundamentally on the obedience of individuals and individual subjection to the institution of law and order when the feudal form of allegiance was no longer required. In this context, the Calcutta Riots further tell us how borders within a city emerge in situations of vioelcne and how and event like the Calcutta Riots dispels the myth that the city is an organic unity unaffected by borders and boundary-making exercises, and how the failure of the Calcutta Riot Enquiry Commission to conclude its findings demonstrated the closure of legal logic. Met literatuuropgave.