![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This article analyses how the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalists and the communal violence in its aftermath (1992–93) is remembered in a predominantly Muslim slum neighbourhood in Mumbai. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it considers how a traumatic event is given meaning through fragmented memories inscribed in the urban space. A nuanced analysis of the recollections of the city’s Muslim poor, who faced the main brunt of the violence, suggests that the spatial context of the Muslim neighbourhoods provide a safe social backdrop for the expression of an otherwise suppressed memory that has been pushed by the official narratives of the past into marginality, leading to the creation of an alternative sociality that addresses community concerns to break the hold of the past and imagine a future of peaceful cohabitation.
Acknowledgments
I thank my informants in Mumbai for their generosity and patience in sharing their experiences and insights without which this paper would have been impossible to write. A PhD fellowship awarded by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany, funded this research. An earlier version of this paper was written and presented during a research fellowship at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/German Research Foundation (FOR-2779). I thank my colleagues there for their critical interventions and encouragement. This paper has greatly benefitted from the comments and suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers. Any shortcomings remain my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The demolition of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in the North Indian town of Ayodhya was the culmination of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, a campaign to reclaim the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, spearheaded by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu-Right political party, which also brought the party back into Indian politics as a prominent player, making this event a landmark in the communalisation of politics and public culture in India: Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994); Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In November 2019, the Supreme Court of India ruled in favour of the site being used to build a Hindu temple; this was soon after the BJP formed a democratically elected government for a second term in office with an increased vote share.
2. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. Jeffrey Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey Alexander et al. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004): 1–30.
4. Kai Erikson, ‘Notes on Trauma and Community’, in American Imago 48, no. 4 (1991): 455–72.
5. Two significant contributions to our understanding of official silences that surround violent and disturbing events are Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of The Emergency in Delhi (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003)—Tarlo looks at personal and official narratives of ‘the Emergency’ in India (1975–77) as avenues of remembering and forgetting; and Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000)—Butalia focuses on personal narratives that countered the official state narrative on Partition.
6. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014): 20–41.
7. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, 1–30.
8. Rubina Jasani, ‘Violence, Reconstruction and Islamic Reform: Stories from the Muslim “Ghetto”’, Modern Asian Studies 42, nos. 2/3 (2008): 431–56, shows how Muslim survivors in post-pogrom Gujarat negotiated their relationship with Islamic reform movements to secure safe living in the light of the economic losses incurred during the violence through tact and diplomacy.
9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
10. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991).
11. Smriti Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-tech City (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2004).
12. Stephen Legg, ‘Sites of Counter-Memory: The Refusal to Forget and the Nationalist Struggle in Colonial Delhi’, Historical Geography 33 (2005): 180–201.
13. Fieldwork was conducted in 2009–10, 2014–15 and 2016.
14. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
15. Rowena Robinson, Tremors of Violence: Muslim Survivors of Ethnic Strife in Western India (New Delhi: Sage, 2005).
16. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
17. Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta, Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007).
18. Asgar Ali Engineer, ‘Bombay Riots: Second Phase’, Economic & Political Weekly 28 (1993): 505–08; B.N. Srikrishna, Report of the Srikrishna Commission Appointed for Inquiry into the Riots at Mumbai during December 1992 and January 1993 (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1998).
19. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
20. Ibid.
21. Jeffrey Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).
22. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, The Psychoanalytic Review (1913–1957) 4, no. 6 (1924): 77–87.
23. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
24. Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
25. Stef Jansen, ‘The Violence of Memories: Local Narratives of the Past after Ethnic Cleansing in Croatia’, Rethinking History 6, no. 1 (2002): 77–93.
26. Ibid.
27. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001).
28. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
29. Hendrik de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
30. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1952).
31. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
32. Paul Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in The Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Paul Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003).
33. Ibid.
34. Amelie Blom and Nicolas Jaoul, ‘Introduction: The Moral and Affectual Dimension of Collective Action in South Asia’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.1912.
35. Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
36. Ibid.
37. Paola Bacchetta, ‘Sacred Space in Conflict in India: The Babri Masjid Affair’, Growth and Change 31, no. 2 (2000): 255–84.
38. Peter van der Veer, ‘Riots and Rituals: The Construction of Violence and Public Space in Hindu Nationalism’, in Riots and Pogroms, ed. Paul R. Brass (London: Macmillan, 1996): 154–76.
39. Ibid.
40. Paul R. Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003); and Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
41. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘The Political Theology of Violence in Contemporary India’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.1872.
45. S. Hussain Zaidi, Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts (London: Penguin, 2014).
46. Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of State in Mumbai’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. Chris Fuller and Veronique Bénéï (London and New Delhi: Hurst, 2001): 221–54.
47. Vyjayanthi Rao, ‘How to Read a Bomb: Scenes from Bombay’s Black Friday’, Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 567–92.
48. Marika Vicziany, ‘Understanding the 1993 Mumbai Bombings: Madrassas and the Hierarchy of Terror’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 43–73.
49. Tania Roy, ‘“India’s 9/11”: Accidents of a Moveable Metaphor’, Theory, Culture & Society 26, nos. 7–8 (2009): 314–28.
50. Faisal Devji, ‘Attacking Mumbai’, The Immanent Frame, December 12, 2008, accessed June 26, 2020, https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/12/12/attacking-mumbai/.
51. Vyjayanthi Rao, ‘A New Urban Type: Gangsters, Terrorists, Global Cities’, Critique of Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2011): 3–20.
52. Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
53. Ibid., 93–94.
54. Veena Das, Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
55. See the report of the inquiry into the Mumbai riots in 1992–93: Justice B.N. Srikrishna, Report of the Srikrishna Commission Appointed for Inquiry into the Riots at Mumbai during December 1992 and January 1993 (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1998).
56. Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths’, 221–54.
57. Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad; and Talad Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
58. Lindsay Calhoun, ‘Islamic Martyrdom in the Postcolonial Condition’, in Text and Performance Quarterly 24, nos. 3–4 (2004): 327–47; David Cook, ‘Martyrdom in Islam’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael Jerryson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 227–42.
59. Calhoun, ‘Islamic Martyrdom’, 327–47.
60. Ibid.
61. All names used here are pseudonyms.
62. This was also an observation made by Robinson in her interviews with women in Mumbai as compared to those she met in Ahmedabad and Vadodara: Robinson, Tremors of Violence, 113–153.
63. Interview with Shamim, Mumbai, November 19, 2009.
64. Alice Goffman, ‘When the Police Knock Your Door In’, in Violence at the Urban Margins, ed. Javier Auyero, Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
65. It is very common to see symbols of the Shiv Sena (the saffron flag with interlocking swords, a roaring tiger or an image of Shivaji) displayed on vehicles owned by individual police personnel. The close connections of the Shiv Sena with the city’s police force are of course well documented: see Asgar Ali Engineer, ‘Communal Violence and Role of Police’, Economic & Political Weekly 29, no. 15 (1994): 835–40; Hansen, Wages of Violence; and Julia Eckert, The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics and the Shiv Sena (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
66. Notable exceptions to this are annual memorial events organised by big media houses such as the Indian Express Group and the India Today Group. The former is organised at the Gateway of India and even has a famous movie star, Amitabh Bachchan, as its brand ambassador. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, which was one of the sites of violence, has a memorial plaque installed in concrete bearing the names of the people killed there.
67. Interview with Amjad Khan, Mumbai, January 24, 2010.
68. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 2005).
69. Veronique Bénéï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
70. Paul Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 59–71.
71. Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory’, 1–30.
72. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 20–41.
73. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989).
74. Ibid.
75. Mohalla committees are a quasi-state institution set up all across Mumbai, after the bomb blasts on March 12, 1993, to serve as an interface between the city’s police and members of the public in an attempt to foster harmony, engage in conflict management and promote tolerance through peaceful co-existence: see Qudsiya Contractor, ‘Institutionalising Peace? Mohalla Committees in Contemporary Mumbai’, in From the Margins to the Mainstream: Institutionalising Minorities in South Asia, ed. Hugo Gorringe, Roger Jeffery and Suryakant Waghmore (New Delhi: Sage, 2016): 201–28.
76. Interview with Adnan, Mumbai, June 11, 2015.
77. The processes of abjection and exclusion faced by Muslims might find an expression in disgust towards the more disadvantaged based on hierarchies of class and caste among them as an alternative mode of being and a challenge to dominant (Hindu majoritarian) hierarchies of power. The invocation and framing of disgust in this way points to the prevalence of an ordinary politics of disgust as embodied critique by marginalised and subaltern groups: Shaheed Tayob, ‘Disgust as Embodied Critique: Being Middle Class and Muslim in Mumbai’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 6 (2019): 1192–209.
78. Vijay Raghavan and Roshni Nair, ‘Over-Representation of Muslims: The Prisons of Maharashtra’, Economic & Political Weekly 48, no. 11 (2013): 12–17.
79. Contractor, ‘Institutionalising Peace?’, 201–28.
80. Interview with Sameena, Mumbai, November 18, 2009.
81. Stef Jansen, ‘Hope For/Against the State: Gridding in a Besieged Sarajevo Suburb’, Ethnos 79, no. 2 (2014): 238– 60.
82. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990).