Ajay Verghese's The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India is a simple book with a simplistic premise. That premise, repeated often throughout the book, is that ethnic violence in contemporary India is driven by historical factors from the colonial period. “In the provinces, the British favored high castes, protected religious minorities through a policy of neutrality, and discriminated against low castes and adivasis. In the princely states, native kings did the opposite: their policies favored their co-religionists, protected the low castes and tribals, and discriminated against non-coreligionists.… Today, former British provinces like Ajmer and Malabar experience primarily caste and tribal violence whereas former princely states such as Jaipur and Travancore suffer considerable religious violence” (p. 149). Academics working on South Asia (and local residents) would be surprised to know that there is religious violence in Travancore and caste violence in Malabar. I for one am rather taken aback, since I have been working on Kerala now for almost thirty years.

Verghese provides a twist on the colonial origins of contemporary violence by arguing that British rule, contrary to the findings of most research on South Asia, “promoted caste violence but reduced religious violence” (p. 10). The three case studies look at comparisons between Jaipur/Ajmer and Travancore/Malabar (princely states versus British provinces), and the princely state of Bastar as an “outlier.” Verghese makes an important intervention about the neglect of the princely states in studies on South Asia and argues that, despite colonial rule, princes exercised considerable power over their domains and populations, governed according to religious dictates, and served the religious majority. Therefore, studying Travancore and Jaipur as Hindu domains, as opposed to the “secular” rule in British provinces, brings into mainstream discourse what historians of princely states have always taken for granted. While Jaipur, therefore, has been characterized by religious riots, Ajmer has had few communal incidents and more violence against scheduled castes. The presence or absence of Hindu nationalist organizations has not been crucial, Verghese argues, for the outbreak of riots between Hindus and Muslims. We get to know little about the presence of the renowned Sufi dargah at Ajmer and how it may act as an associational focus inflecting interreligious relations. We are also not told about the fact of Rajasthan being ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has considerable impact in Jaipur or elsewhere on Hindu-Muslim relations. Thus, the abstraction of the contrast between princely state and British province stands in for a textured analysis.

Verghese argues that caste and tribal violence has characterized Malabar, while communal violence has characterized Travancore's history. As a generation of scholars of Travancore has argued, while there were communal organizations in Travancore based on caste (the Nair Service Society and SNDP Yogam) and religion (Syrian and Anglican Christians), this was, as James Chiriyankandath has shown, “welfare communalism,” that is, organizations that got together to promote the interests of their grouping. While there was communalism, there was almost no communal violence. In order to argue that religion did not matter in Malabar, Verghese understands the Mappila Muslim outbreaks that began in the late nineteenth century and culminated in the Malabar Rebellion of 1921 as a conflict of “low castes against high castes” (p. 120). This flies in the face of all historical evidence, and Verghese's conjecture that vast numbers of the Mappillas were actually converts from the lower castes would surprise most scholars. He argues further that in Malabar, Hindu nationalists have failed to make headway (p. 128). But Kerala, and Malabar in particular, lead India in the number of RSS branches (over 5,000 at present). Travancore is said to have experienced a “bloodless social revolution” and the granting of temple entry to lower castes (p. 140). There is no mention of over forty years of social ferment, caste organization, and the radical politics and counter-theologies of Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyapan, and Narayana Guru that forced the monarch's hand into moving away from upper-caste prejudices. When Verghese argues that Travancore has had no tribal agitations while Malabar has seen many (p. 146), he fails to mention that over 80 percent of the tribal groups are to be found in Malabar along the Western Ghats.

So, to recapitulate the argument of the book, princely states are characterized by religious violence and British provinces by caste and tribal violence. This leads to the question that governs the chapter on the former princely state of Bastar: “why has this small kingdom, which never came under British direct rule, experienced such horrific tribal violence?” (p. 150). When almost 70 percent of the population is tribal, this should not occasion much surprise. Again when Verghese says that though Bastar was a princely state, it was indistinguishable from a British province (p. 165), he seems unmindful that the British government dealt with tribal majority areas differently. He then goes on to state disarmingly that, given the premise that princely states should have been prone to religious violence, the fact that Bastar was not may have to do with the Muslims being only 2 percent of the population. This he says, is “not unexpected” (p. 165).

A chapter on patterns of ethnic conflicts, looking at data from 589 districts, reaches the conclusion, among others, that “former provinces experience 93% more Naxalite casualties than former Princely states” (p. 173). Verghese does not consider that Naxalite political activity is concentrated in areas of tribal population while in most former princely states, the tribal populations are in a small minority. The last chapter attempts to extend the basic premise of the book to Burma, Malaya, and Nigeria, but the mechanical postulation—peasant movements in British provinces and racial, religious, or ethnic divisions in native states—is a travesty of complex local colonial and postcolonial histories.

The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India takes seriously the trajectories of politics in princely India and urges a comparative perspective with British provinces. In this, it provides a distinct perspective on ethnic violence in India.