Policing everyday life: The FIR in the Tamil countryside, c. 1900–50

The judicial archive pertaining to the southern districts of Madras Presidency in the first half of the twentieth century indicates that judges, policemen and colonial subjects shared the belief that reports of crime made to the police, the ‘First Information Reports’ or FIRs, were often fabricated, resulting in what was termed a ‘false case’. This article argues that the prevalence of ‘false cases’ does not simply point to a colonial state that was weak in the countryside or whose judicial machinery had gone awry. Rather, the filing of police reports provided a mechanism for villagers to insert the disputes that were part of everyday life into the state’s legal apparatus and to make claims using the language of colonial law. The documentary practices of the colonial state thus shaped local politics, so that registering complaints with the police was an event in rural conflict, not simply the means of resolving conflict that had occurred earlier or elsewhere. Equally, these negotiations for local power through registering cases reaffirmed the authority of the colonial state in everyday practices that emerged around the figure of the policeman and in the space of the colonial police station.