“Canadians Are Not Proficient in the Art of Lynching”

In this chapter, Nandana Dutta examines the turn to collective violence, especially lynching, in postcolonial India, tracing it to “the forms of agency that emerged in the peculiar understanding of issues of modernity, the rule of law, and the indigenous Gandhian form of self rule known famously as swaraj during and after the Independence movement.” Dutta reflects on the connotations of the word lynching as it has been used in recent years in India to refer both to the taking of life by a mob or group, and to also refer to occasions of mob fury/action where death may not actually occur but the dynamics of the individual/mob victim-perpetrator relationship are similar. Noting the influence of American culture in the spread of the term lynching in India, Dutta argues that Indian collective violence “has emerged alongside or in the wake of movements for autonomy, identity, and territory that have become independent India’s most significant problem because these provide both occasion and site for the exercise of agency in the form of extralegal violence.”