Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c5.29

c5.29

These protests were at times tinged by violence at some point. Most often, however, what is termed as violence was the resort to *traga*, *koor*, etc., (which are familiar under other names) inflicted by individuals upon themselves as a means of protest. On the occasions when the people actually resorted to violence, it was mostly a reaction to governmental terror, as in the cases of the various ‘Bunds’ in Maharashtra during the 1820-40s.²⁰ (At what point the people reacted to terror and repression by resorting to violence is a subject for separate study.) (The violence manifest in modern movements of civil disobedience and the counter violence adopted by the authorities to deal with it require deeper investigation. According to Charles Tilly in *Collective Violence in European Perspective*: ‘A large proportion of the...disturbances we have been surveying turned violent at exactly the moment when the authorities intervened to stop an illegal but non-violent action...the great bulk of the killing and wounding...was done by troops or police rather than by insurgents or demonstrators.’ Commenting on this, Michael Walzer believes that ‘the case is the same...in the United States.’ (*Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship*, 1970. p. 32).)