Colonial martial law used mass violence as moral education of the colonized

Evidence

Race perpetually tested the limits of universal law and the exception resolved this tension by providing two different regimes of law under one banner. … Nasser Hussain provides an example of the logic of the jurisprudence of emergency as authority and morality in his analysis of the Amritsar massacre in nineteenth-century British India. Relying on the authority of martial law, the British General Dyer ordered his troops to fire into a crowd of Indians until 379 lay dead and thousands injured. Despite the best efforts of the Home Office to depict Dyer’s actions as those of a madman driven to excesses, Dyer himself explained his behaviour as duty – the duty to teach the natives a lesson or, in his words, ‘to produce a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view.’ The killing would have gone on, Dyer asserted, until the lesson was learnt. Only the lack of bullets stopped it. Dyer, Hussain comments, ‘unabashedly links the performativity of violence to the project of moral education,’ understanding completely that martial law’s purpose was none other than the reconstitution of the authority of the state and the inscription of obedience on the bodies of the colonized. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the killings/state-violence thread in Things Fall Apart and to the logic of the exception in Agamben’s state-of-exception literature. — connects to: Educated black elites were trained as a mediating restraint against mass violence — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 154
• SEED: The Amritsar massacre as a case study in how states cast violence as pedagogy could anchor an essay on the moral education of compliance.