Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, HistoriesMuch 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 practices--the 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. |
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Contents
Introduction Negotiating the Boundaries of Political Violence | 1 |
In Defense of the Fragment | 16 |
Reply to a RightWing Journalist | 45 |
The Nation and Its Past | 50 |
Monumental History | 68 |
Ayodhya and the State | 93 |
The Question of Belonging | 103 |
Marked and Unmarked Citizens | 129 |
Cognizing Community | 154 |
The Secular State? | 172 |
Notes | 193 |
217 | |
221 | |
Other editions - View all
Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories Gyanendra Pandey,Professor of History Gyanendra Pandey No preview available - 2006 |
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