Changing Structures of Violence during the Territorial Expansion of the British Company-State in Bengal
My dissertation aims to enrich the current research on the nexus of affect and violence in colonial India. I seek to answer the questions of how different affects were entangled and intermixed, how these affects were lived and materialised in the socio-physical space, and how these materialised affects enabled and facilitated the use of violence. Through these questions, I aim to challenge romanticised historical accounts of the British Empire and contribute to the ongoing debate on colonial violence by highlighting the significance of atmospheric practices as preconditions for violent action.
I explore the relationship between affect and violence at the beginning of the colonial period in Bengal, from 1756 to 1793, when the East India Company rose from a trading company to become the local ruler of Bengal. This rise was accompanied by an affective reorganisation characterised by a slow shift from a fluid and interactive relationship between the Company officials and local intermediaries to a more distant, sceptical, suspicious and racialised one.
During this period, I will first seek to gain a deeper understanding of the overall affective landscape of the British community, and how it has changed over the years. Rather than focusing on one affect or one social group, I analyse the affective landscape as multi-layered, with different affects conflicting or converging, dampening or amplifying each other. Only this complex of different, intermixed affects, I argue, can adequately capture the violent nature of the British Empire in India.
Secondly, I focus on affect as a relation between bodies and things that inhabit and shape socio-physical space. Through the notion of atmosphere, I trace the physical materialisations of affect and how the affective lives of individuals are both expressed through and shaped by the spaces they inhabit. Architecture or spatial rituals are then seen as affective practices that create and change an atmosphere. In this sense, the British created or appropriated specific spaces and rituals in order to feel at home and to create an atmosphere of security and homeliness.
Finally, I will consider how British atmospheric practices created conditions that allowed colonial violence to emerge in both everyday interactions and extraordinary excesses. I argue that by shaping the socio-physical space, the British created an atmosphere of tension that facilitated violence. The practices they used to reduce or counteract their anxiety were always already accompanied by a confrontation with that anxiety thereby reinforcing it. In the attempt to create British spaces in a foreign place, the strangeness of that place was made all the more striking and intimidating, while at the same time their display of power reassured the British subjects, lowering the threshold for the exercise of violence.