Politics Of Punishment: How Colonial Violence Became 'Good Parenting' In India

There’s something quintessentially Indian about having been beaten up as a kid. It’s framed not as abuse but something far more dangerous: care. This framing not only makes it invisible but also essentialises it as integral to parenting.

Content creators Vagmita Singh (@thatindianchick_ on Instagram) and Saumya Sahni (@mrsholmes221b) recently talked about pitayi (beating) on their podcast “ShutUp! We’re Talking”, reminiscing about what went through their minds during or after the beatings they received as kids.

They mentioned how each whip of the belt was instrumental in constructing who they are, how each tear shed formed the foundation of the bubbling desire for revenge, how it merely desensitised them to abuse as their feelings of resentment were accompanied by those of appreciation, as their skin glowed and blushed after a good sob.

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As more millennials and Gen Z question their childhoods and their parents’ behaviours, a few questions start to rear their heads at us as a nation: Is pitayi really culturally Indian? And what does it say about a culture where abuse and hierarchy go hand in hand? 

More importantly, where does it leave us if an increasing number of people are waking up to its oppressive nature and opting out for themselves and their future progeny?

Corporal Punishment in Colonial India

To understand this, one needs to know that, along with several other present-day beliefs and practices, corporal punishment was a product of colonialism.

Colonial modernity combined disciplinarian instruments of courts and prisons with the visible violence of whipping and flogging, arguing that the colony was not modern or civilised enough for reforms in punishment.

As Britain abolished public hanging in British cities, whipping, which offers a perfect spectacle of bodily humiliation, leaves scars and invokes the legacy of slavery, was reintroduced in India in 1864.

The ideas of caste, class, gender, and respectability greatly influenced the convictions that led to these punishments.

While women, men over 45, and those serving life imprisonment or death sentences were excluded from these punishments, juveniles, people from lower castes or tribal regions, and repeat offenders were not.

Several scholars have argued that this collapsed the distinctions between juvenile boys and lower-caste adult men by framing both as politically immature.

Meanwhile, the exclusion of women from such punishment functioned not as protection but as a deeper form of depoliticisation that froze them in a permanent state of childhood within colonial legal discourse.

While precolonial India already worked on hierarchical family structures and mild physical reprimands, especially by parents and teachers (Gurus), colonial legal laws codified it, making it measurable and presenting it as justified reform.

It normalised violence as something pedagogical and culturally appropriate. This form of correction and moral education then bled over to parenting. Families internalised this logic. Pain became essential to character building, discipline and obedience defined modernity and respectability.

The use of corporal punishments in schools further legitimised this humiliation and pain experienced by children, and families mirrored this behaviour. Post-colonial India held onto the IPC, school punishment and police culture.

The colonial legacy of discipline became India’s own, where parents now applied it to children not as colonial subjects but as citizens-in-training, model students, and bearers of family honour.

Colonial punishment moved from being impersonal in courts to something private in homes, as well as something practised nationally across schools.

Embedding itself in brown culture, anxieties surrounding education and employment intensified the attempts to produce desirable behaviour. The colonial ideas of obedience and respectability, too, followed.

The middle classes saw discipline as a tool of class mobility. Cultural legitimacy, emotional normalisation and moral justification prevented kids from ever becoming full rights-bearing subjects.

What began as state violence thus mutated into intimate violence in the form of ideal or good parenting.

Why Resisting Family Hierarchies is a Feminist Act

The ideology and working mechanisms of patriarchy and hierarchy are not formally taught in schools or workplaces. Home is where control is first normalised, where obedience is rewarded, silence enforced, and gender roles rehearsed daily.

Corporal punishment, emotional intimidation, and unquestionable parental authority teach children who is allowed to speak, who must endure, and who holds power.

The family trains subjects for the world outside it, reproducing hierarchies long before a child ever encounters the state. And intergenerational trauma does not affect all children in the same way. 

Daughters are often trained to absorb emotional labour, tolerate harm, and maintain harmony at their own expense. Sons, meanwhile, are frequently taught entitlement to authority alongside emotional repression, inheriting both privilege and profound disconnection.

Patriarchy harms everyone, but it does so unevenly, producing compliant caregivers on one side and emotionally restricted power-holders on the other.

Ending gender oppression, therefore, requires confronting how authority, fear, and discipline are structured inside homes and then dismantling that system entirely.

Views expressed by the author are their own.