The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India.

By Paul R. Brass. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 448p. $50.00.

In this book, Paul Brass, one of America's foremost scholars of Indian politics, draws on four decades of fieldwork to make an important contribution to a rapidly growing literature on the causes of Hindu-Muslim riots in India, the persistence of which is justly considered an embarrassment to the world's largest democracy.

The book centers on the politics of riots in the North Indian city of Aligarh. Focusing on a single city over 38 years allows Brass to conduct a diachronic analysis of riots in a single site, an ideal research design for understanding the persistence of riots. The key to the book's importance is its provocative argument. Essentially, Brass implicates the political order of North India in fomenting Hindu-Muslim riots for electoral gain (p. 6). Riots, he explains, are not spontaneous eruptions of primordial hatreds but “dramatic productions, creations of specific persons, groups, and parties operating through institutionalized riot networks within a discursive framework of Hindu-Muslim communal opposition and antagonism that in turn produces specific forms of political practice that makes riots integral to the political process” (p. 369). Once riots end, the process enters its final stage of generating “post hoc interpretations, analyses, and explanations that are in no way scientific or adequate to yield satisfying causal statements, but rather themselves contribute to the persistence of riots” (p. 369).

The argument thus has three main components. First, there exist in some North Indian cities (why not in the South is a question Brass does not address) what Brass calls “institutionalized riot systems.” In these systems, “known persons and groups occupy specific roles in the rehearsal for and the production of communal riots” (p. 32). These people stoke tensions between Hindus and Muslims (p. 118) and, when the political context is right, unleash violence staged to appear spontaneous (p. 258). Second, riots are political instruments used prior to elections to “consolidate one community or the other or both at the local, regional, and national levels into a cohesive political bloc” (p. 34). Lastly, the naming, discussion, and analysis of riots in India is political, feeding into what Brass calls “blame displacement.”

The book's organization reflects this tripartite argument. Following an opening section providing an overview of the terrain, it is divided into five additional parts. Part II describes the demographic, caste, and communal composition of Aligarh and recounts some of its more calamitous riots. Part III considers effects of spatial and economic distribution on riots (the chapter on the geography of riots is particularly interesting). Part IV presents evidence on the relationship between elections and riots, while Part V develops the “blame displacement” thesis. Part VI summarizes Brass's conclusions concerning the persistence of Hindu-Muslim conflict in Aligarh.

Any book of this size and scope is bound to raise questions and here I consider five, several of which present opportunities for future research. First, Brass's argument appears limited to North India as he makes no mention of the South. As such, the reader is left wondering why South India has been immune to the vicious electoral strategies that have allegedly resulted in such violence in the North.

Second, the culpability of the police and civil administration in failing to prevent riots and, indeed, in being full participants in the killing of Muslims is thoroughly documented in this book. For instance, in discussing Aligarh's November 1978 riots, Brass claims that “most of the people killed … were shot by the police” (p. 96). About ten days after this phase of rioting, “the district magistrate and senior superintendent of police were replaced” (by whom we are never told) and “under [their] strict control, no further deaths occurred” (p. 96). Yet Brass offers no explanation for such observed variation in police and civil administration responses.

Third, Brass insists that “communal riots have preceded and have led to intensification of interparty competition” but not the other way around (p. 220). But the most plausible argument here is endogenous. That is, where elections are expected to be keenly contested, the incentive to use riots to polarize and mobilize voters increases, which is consistent with Brass's finding that “riots have often occurred in close temporal proximity to elections” (p. 231).

Fourth, Brass regrettably fails to use his rich data from Aligarh to comment directly on the other recent explanation of Hindu-Muslim violence in India (Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 2002). While Brass makes clear his disdain for Varshney's work (see p. 419, note 44, for an almost ad hominem attack), he never deals with the “civic life” argument as a possible alternative explanation.

Finally, and most disturbingly, the tone of the book suggests a lack of objectivity on the part of the author. Brass clearly sees Muslims as the victims of Hindu aggression in India, but the line between identifying certain political parties claiming to represent Hindus and all Hindus as the culprits is blurred. Consider this long quotation, which is jarring in its pejorative nature: “In India … the two communities that are seen to be at war or prone to intergroup violence are also associated with distinctive approaches to history…. In India, it is the Muslims who have a true historical consciousness…. Most Hindus, by contrast, cannot and do not try to separate what others consider mythology from history…. Their own dates for their origins, their books, their monuments tend to be fantastic, not credible, said to have arisen in eras that all schoolboys in the West know to have been pre-historic, even pre-Homo sapiens” (pp. 382–83). Such claims, for which no evidence is given in support, are irrelevant to his central argument, and their inclusion serves only to distract.

These criticisms notwithstanding I remain convinced that Paul Brass has written an important book with an original and compelling argument for the how, when, where, and why of Hindu-Muslim riots in modern India. To my knowledge, this is the first explanation to tackle all four questions simultaneously, which fact alone should ensure that it is widely read and a staple on South Asia and comparative ethnic conflict graduate syllabi.