131 Seeing like a Policeman: Everyday Violence in British India, c. 1900–1950 Radha Kumar Madras Presidency, sprawled across the southern end of peninsular India, comprised around two dozen districts and occupied an area of 141,189 square miles. 1 The Government of Madras administered this vast southern province from its capital at Fort St. George, located in the port town of Madras. The provincial police force was also headquartered in Madras, in a beautiful neoclassical building that overlooked the calm waters of the Bay of Bengal. The building’s occupants, however, looked away from the sea, towards the province’s hinterlands. Theirs was the task to supervise the working of the district police, to ensure that law was enforced and order maintained across the province. But what really could they see of rural Madras from this distant, urban perch? How did a force of 30,000 manage a population of 40 million? 2 One way the police coped with the numerical disparity and geographical spread they faced was by reacting rather than preventing—specifcally, by responding to ‘trouble’ quickly, with spectacular use of violence. In twentieth-century Madras Presidency, armed police units were ‘quickly sent to deal with any variety of disturbance or resistance to colonial control—a religious © The Author(s) 2018 P. Dwyer and A. Nettelbeck (eds.), Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62923-0_7 R. Kumar (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: rkuma100@maxwell.syr.edu