Since Independence, India has witnessed communal clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups. Commentators and social scientists in India have been understandably concerned with these clashes, as well as the peculiar nature of such communal violence in the country. Violent incidents continue to rock the nation, making this field a particularly important area of study.
Sectarian Violence in India offers a cumulative account of social science research on the crucially important subject of communal violence from the late 1960s until about 2015. It brings together a critical selection of articles on sectarian violence in the post-Independence era from the Economic and Political Weekly, a journal that has best represented social scientists over the years and is the single largest source of studies on this subject.
Thefour sections of this volume study the nature of communal violence in India; offer observations on the theoretical and conceptual issues relating to such violence; probe the complicated and causal role of politics in communal violence; and provide accounts of some of the riots that have occurred in independent India. The chapters cover a wide variety of factors, including—but not limited to—religion, vote bank politics and the trail of money in such seemingly ‘social’ issues. They also explore how such violence affects other social institutions, such as caste and gender.
The volume, which contains the work of some of India’s best-known scholars, will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology and political science.