Modern Indian studies have recently become a site for new, creative, and thought-provoking debates extending over a broad canvas of crucial issues. As a result of socio-political transformations, certain concepts—such as ahimsa, caste, darshan, and race—have taken on different meanings. Bringing together ideas, issues, and debates salient to modern Indian studies, this volume charts the social, cultural, political, and economic processes at work in the Indian subcontinent. Authored by internationally recognized experts, this volume comprises over one hundred individual entries on concepts central to their respective fields of specialization, highlighting crucial issues and debates in a lucid and concise manner. Each concept is accompanied by a critical analysis of its trajectory and a succinct discussion of its significance in the academic arena as well as in the public sphere. Enhancing the shared framework of understanding about the Indian subcontinent, Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies will provide the reader with insights into vital debates about the region, underscoring the compelling issues emanating from colonialism and postcolonialism.

Chronic Hindu-Muslim rioting in India has created a situation in which communal violence is both so normal and so varied in its manifestations that it would seem to defy effective analysis. Paul R. Brass, one of the world’s preeminent experts on South Asia, has tracked more than half a century’s riots in the north Indian city of Aligarh. This book is the culmination of a lifetime’s thinking about the dynamics of institutionalized intergroup violence in northern India, covering the last three decades of British rule as well as the entire post-Independence history of Aligarh. Brass exposes the mechanisms by which endemic communal violence is deliberately provoked and sustained. He convincingly implicates the police, criminal elements, members of Aligarh’s business community, and many of its leading political actors in the continuous effort to “produce” communal violence. Much like a theatrical production, specific roles are played, with phases for rehearsal, staging, and interpretation. In this way, riots become key historical markers in the struggle for political, economic, and social dominance of one community over another. In the course of demonstrating how riots have been produced in Aligarh, Brass offers a compelling argument for abandoning or refining a number of widely held views about the supposed causes of communal violence, not just in India but throughout the rest of the world. An important addition to the literature on Indian and South Asian politics, this book is also an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the interplay of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, and collective violence, wherever it occurs.

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Transcript of lectures organized by the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, Chandigarh; chiefly in the context of India of the eighties.

The decade of the 1940s was a turbulent one for Bengal. War, famine, riots and partition - Bengal witnessed it all, and the unique experience of each of these factors created a space for diverse social and political forces to thrive and impact the lives of people of the province. The book embarks on a study of the last seven years of colonial rule in Bengal, analysing the interplay of multiple socioeconomic and political factors that shaped community identities into communal ones. The focus is on three major communal riots that the province witnessed - the Dacca Riots (1941), the Great Calcutta Killings (August 1946) and the Noakhali Riots (October 1946). This book moves beyond the binary understanding of communalism as Hindu versus Muslim and looks at the caste politics in the province, and offers a complete understanding of the 1940s before partition.

This book examines conflict and violence among religious minorities and the implication on the idea of citizenship in contemporary India. Going beyond the usual Hindu-Muslim question, it situates communalism in the context of conflicts between Muslims and Christians. By tracing the long history of conflict between the Marakkayar Muslims and Mukkuvar Christians in South India, it explores the notion of ‘mobilization of religious identity’ within the discourse on communal violence in South Asia as also discusses the spatial dynamics in violent conflicts. Including rich empirical evidence from historical and ethnographic material, the author shows how the contours of violence among minorities position Muslims as more vulnerable subjects of violent conflicts. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of politics, political sociology, sociology and social anthropology, minority studies and South Asian studies. It will also interest those working on peace and conflict, violence, ethnicity and identity as also activists and policymakers concerned with the problems of fishing communities.

Revised version of papers presented at a seminar organised by All India Radio in October 1968.

With the demolition of the Babri Masjid and subsequent riots of the late 1980s and 1990s in Uttar Pradesh, the period that followed appeared relatively peaceful. Only at the turn of the century, India witnessed a strong wave of communalism in early 2000s. After the Godhra riots of Gujarat in 2002, Uttar Pradesh saw a series of them--in Mau in 2005, Lucknow in 2006, Gorakhpur in 2007, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013--announcing the return of fundamentalism in the Bharatiya Janta Party's core agenda of Hindutva politics. Everyday Communalism not only attempts to explore the anatomy of a Hindu-Muslim riot and its aftermath, but also examines the inner workings that enable deep-seated polarization between communities. Pai and Kumar show that frequent, low-intensity communal clashes pegged on routine everyday issues and resources help establish a permanent anti-Muslim prejudice among Hindus legitimizing majoritarian rule in the eyes of an increasingly polarized, intolerant, and entitled majority community of Hindus. Uttar Pradesh's rising cultural aspirations; economic anxieties to move away from its traditionally backward status; a deep caste-marked agrarian crisis; and sharp inequalities and acute poverty further play into the making a new post-Ayodhya phase of Hindutva politics.

Many of the central issues in modern Indian politics have long been understood in terms of an opposition between ideologies of secularism and communalism. Observers have argued that recent Hindu nationalism is the symptom of a crisis of Indian secularism and have blamed this on a resurgence of religion or communalism. Shabnum Tejani unpacks prevailing assumptions about the meaning of secularism in contemporary politics, focusing on India but with many points of comparison elsewhere in the world. She questions the simple dichotomy between secularism and communalism that has been used in scholarly study and political discourse. Tracing the social, political, and intellectual genealogies of the concepts of secularism and communalism from the late nineteenth century until the ratification of the Indian constitution in 1950, she shows how secularism came to be bound up with ideas about nationalism and national identity.