Routine Violence

by Pandey, Gyanendra

• ISBN13: 9780804752640
• ISBN10: 0804752648
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-02
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Much has been written about the "extraordinary" violence of recent history, its brutality, and the impossibility of describing it. Routine Violence focuses on the violence of much more routine political practicesthe drawing up of political categories and the writing of national histories. The book takes its material from the history of twentieth-century India: the land of Gandhi and of effective nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. It asks questions about how particular histories are claimed as the "real" histories of a nation; how the "sacred" nation, and its ("mainstream") culture and politics, come to be constructed; and how a certain inducement to violence, and a collective amnesia regarding that violence, follow from all of this. This is the first book to engage in a sustained investigation of the routine political violence of our times. No sales in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

Author Biography

Gyanendra Pandey is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History at Emory University; a founder member of “Subaltern Studies”; and author of The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001) among other books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: Negotiating the Boundaries of Political Violence	1	(15)
In Defense of the Fragment	16	(34)
Appendix to Chapter 2: Reply to a Right-Wing Journalist	45	(5)
The Nation and Its Past	50	(18)
Monumental History	68	(35)
Appendix to Chapter 4: Ayodhya and the State	93	(10)
The Question of Belonging	103	(26)
Marked and Unmarked Citizens	129	(25)
Cognizing Community	154	(18)
The Secular State?	172	(21)
Notes	193	(24)
Further Reading	217	(4)
Index	221