Rioting in South Asia is commonly understood as a form of political activity, and the idea that it may not be spontaneous but planned is not a novel one. However, in The Production of Hindu Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Paul Brass makes the more interesting claim that riot-prone cities are those that are marked by institutionalized systems that create, control, and direct the course of riots. He bases these ideas—developed in his earlier work Theft of an Idol—on four decades of research carried out in the northern Indian town of Aligarh, home to a sizable and historic Muslim community. Brass argues that polarizing issues or incidents by themselves do not lead to riots, but that a toxic mix of interested politicians, an existing discourse of communalism, an ineffective administration, and a specialized network that “produces” riots enhances the likelihood that such incidents will eventuate in riots. In describing this social construction of rioting, Brass highlights interesting features, such as the need for a group to dominate the narrative describing the riot, which establishes it as a defensive rather than offensive measure, thereby creating legitimacy for the violence.

Brass raises four questions in his volume: Why do Hindu-Muslim communal riots persist in India? Why do they ebb and flow over time and across different places? How do large-scale violent events get classified in the press as riots rather than as pogroms? Whose interests are served by the acceptance of riots as routine occurrences in politics? In answering these questions, Brass prefers to step away from questions of causality to descriptions of sequencing of events that culminate in the “production” of a riot. Drawing on the works of Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Brass identifies riots as a form of collective action that occurs when a number of factors repeatedly coincide to produce an institutionalized riot system. In developing this theme, Brass parallels the recent work of Ashutosh Varshney, who used the concept of institutionalized peace systems to explain the lack of rioting in some cities in India in his (2002) Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India.

Brass notes that much “causal” discussion of rioting tends to devolve into rhetorics of blame or exculpation. He thus chooses to focus on the persistence of riots rather than on their precipitants or “causes,” contending that it is the “how” more than the “why” that matters most (p. 16). There are, he proposes, three phases of riot production: preparation or rehearsal; activation or enactment—a phase when electoral competition or political mobilization engenders the consolidation of one group against a perceived threat from another; and that of explanation or interpretation—a process of what he calls blame displacement (p. 15), which is necessary to control the interpretation of the causes of violence.

The choice of Aligarh as the site of the case study was dictated by methodological as well as historical reasons. Examining riots across time in one city provided the author a chance to investigate their persistence, as well as to concentrate on specific neighborhoods. The site of Aligarh Muslim University, historic birthplace of the idea of Pakistan, Aligarh has been a site of enduring and sometimes acute Hindu-Muslim tension, rioting, and political violence, making it a good “laboratory” for investigating the dynamics that interest Brass.

Brass has organized the book into five major sections. The first outlines the demographic profile of communities and their histories in Aligarh; the second focuses exclusively on social factors conducive to rioting; and the third draws evidence based on interviews and electoral data that demonstrate the nexus between riots and political competition. The penultimate section looks at the discourse on communalism and its reporting by police, press, and politicians. A concluding section and postscript on riots in Gujarat complete the volume.

Although the research for this work focused on Aligarh, Brass's basic thesis was vividly illustrated in the first half of 2002, when the western state of Gujarat was plagued by Hindu-Muslim riots that were precipitated by a violent Hindu backlash against an alleged attack on Hindu nationalist volunteers. All the elements outlined above coalesced in the grim outcome widely reported in the world press: Gujarat's government was dominated by a hard-line faction of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a militant Hindu-based party; the BJP and other Hindu groups had stoked communal feelings that allowed for the incident of the Hindu volunteers being accepted as an attack rather than an accident; and finally the lack of an effective response by the administration allowed the riots to continue unabated. Clearly, the coordinated nature of attacks indicated an institutional system of riot production.

The work also highlights the use of riots by secular parties, which have sought to control the discourse on riots to assist their political fortunes, by mobilizing Muslims to vote in their favor. This notion of dominating the discourse and narrative of the riot—so that a state-abetted pogrom such as the one in Gujarat acquires the two-sided complexion of a riot—is a key factor that is often ignored by commentators who reductively view riots as spontaneous yet malleable expressions of popular outrage. Brass's account makes the reader wonder whether there are or ever have been any genuinely spontaneous communal riots in India. Is Aligarh a special case where spontaneity is missing from riots and the violence is entirely orchestrated? Or are certain issues or episodes so highly emotive and spontaneously combustible—such as the Babri Masjid demolition, which was bound to aggravate communal tensions without any riot-production mechanism—that they might cause unplanned eruptions of riots? Addressing these questions more fully and more generally than Brass's case study manages to do would yield a clearer picture of political violence.

This book contributes significantly to the literature on South Asian politics and political violence. It demonstrates how the necessities of political competition and demography, coupled with an institutionalized riot system, can lead to widespread and constant rioting. Yet, while it is true that the discourse of riot causation can become moralistic and obscurantist, these problems can be surmounted by access to varied and numerous sources of information that go beyond politically dominant media often manipulated by political elites. Indeed, a more thorough examination of the origin of different sources can and should yield both important factual information relevant to causal accounts and greater insight into the ways that ethnic and religious entities are discursively mobilized. In this sense, Brass's own insights point toward a more causal analysis.

There are other minor problems with Brass's analysis. The author's lack of attention to Muslim riot-production mechanisms relative to Hindu ones makes the book rather one-sided as a piece of political analysis. Are Muslim riot-production mechanisms nonexistent? If not, how do they operate? A genuinely comparative study of Hindu and Muslim riot production would have yielded a much richer account. Similarly, comparison across cities with differing demographic profiles might have yielded differences in riot-production systems, a theme surely worthy of further research. Furthermore, the author's inference is that all politics are local, in the sense that local political needs are converted into riots to achieve specific local aims. In an age when international events and processes cast a long shadow, and populations circulate widely, can any analysis disregard the complex world beyond the local, even in a small city like Aligarh? The Mumbai train blasts of July 2006 were very likely instigated by external agencies, and we wonder how they would fit into the analysis Brass presents.

In the end, this is a valuable addition to research because it highlights issues that have been relatively unexamined in the literature. By examining one city over time, Brass is able to illustrate the dynamics of riot production very effectively. However, de-emphasizing causality may impede the generalizability of his work and its application to cities with different demographics or cities where these factors change constantly due to immigration, emigration, or changes in occupational patterns. Yet for the large parts of South Asia that remain static in these terms, Brass's analysis sounds a cautionary note and offers a useful perspective.