Table Of ContentTheft of an Idol
TEXT AND CONTEXT IN THE
REPRESENTATION OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE
Paul R. Brass
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
1 • ^
■ Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ass, Paul R.
Theft of an idol : text and context in the representation of
collective violence / Paul R. Brass.
p. cm. — (Princeton studies in culture/power/history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-02651-3 (ali. paper). — ISBN 0-691-02650-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Violence—India—Case studies. 2. Violence—Political aspects—India—Case
studies. 3. Riots—India—Case studies. 4. Ethnicity—India—Case studies. 5, India—
Ethnic relations—Case studies. 6. India—Politics and government—Case studies.
I. Title. II. Series.
HN690.Z9V5 1997
303.6’0954— dc20 96-9315
CIP
This book has been composed in Times Roman
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources
Cover Illustration: An object of unknown date and provenance
found in north India by Anand Singh of Mankapur.
Photo by Susan L. Halon.
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton Academic Press
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
(Pbk.)
For my sister,
Frances Ruth Yoeli
and
memory of my brother-in-
Abram (Avi) Yoeli
1935-1984
CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables ix
Preface xi
List of Abbreviations xv
Chapter 1
Text and Context 3
Chapter 2
Background 32
Chapter 3
Theft of an Idol 58
Chapter 4
Rape at Daphnala 97
Chapter 5
Horror Stories 129
Chapter 6
Horror Stories Untold 177
Chapter 7
Kala Bachcha: Portrait of a BJP Hero 204
Chapter 8
Conclusion 260
Index 289
Chapter 1
TEXT AND CONTEXT
'
In I, Pierre Riviere, Foucault presents the text—the memoir of a parricide
and the dossier associated-with it—as “a case, an affair, an event that pro
vided the intersection of discourses-that differed in origin, form, organiza
tion, and function.” The discourses of-judges, prosecutor, country doctor,
the great psychiatrist Esquirol, the villagers, including “their mayor and par
ish priest,” and “the murderer himself’ all appear[ed] to be. speaking of one
and the same thing, of the murders that occurred on June 3, 1835, but the
multiplicity of discourses “form[ed] neither a composite work nor an exem
plary text, but rather a strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a
battle among discourses and through discourses,” “used as weapons of at
tack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge.”1 This contest
was one for the definition of the “truth” of the parricide’s act, the truth not
of its commission, for which the murderer’s own confession provided suffi
cient evidence, but the truth of its explanation and meaning, for the context
in which it should be placed, and for its broader implications concerning the
workings of the human mind in an age of reason from which madness could
not be banished.
This struggle for the appropriate explanation of the parricide’s act and for
the choice of the appropriate punishment as well involved a contest for dom
ination within domains of legal, medical, criminological, and psychiatric
truth and within the institutions in which those domains of truth and knowl
edge were generated: courts, prisons, hospitals, asylums. It also brought
clearly into view the gap in local and national systems of knowledge and
explanation. The local doctor, unable to find scientific categories in which to
place and define the parricide and his act, saw no reason for the intervention
of medico-psychiatric knowledge into this case, which he thought should be
left to the judicial system. The Parisian psychiatrists, of course, ultimately
succeeded in establishing their claim and the consequent spread of psychi
atric “knowledge” not only into the judicial and penal system but throughout
modem Western society.
Another consequence of their ultimate victory was the removal from local
societies of the power to define and interpret local incidents of violence, to
1 Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my
brother ... A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1975), pp. x and xi.
4 CHAPTER 1
place them in a specific context based on local knowledge. Knowledge of
human behavior in nineteenth-century France and in the rest of Western soci
ety became nationalized and universalized. Events that occur in isolated vil
lages and hamlets or on the city streets have become subject to placement in
categories and contexts previously not known to or incidental to the lives of
those who experience them. People with personal knowledge at the sites of
occurrences of violence, lacking knowledge of the appropriate scientific cat
egories in which to place them or refusing to accept the contextualizations of
them imposed by outsiders, continue to generate their own interpretations.
The more perfectly integrated contemporary societies become, however, the
more local and national interpretations merge and the more persons in the
localities find themselves also readily placing local events into ready-made
categories and contexts.
In the twentieth century, local acts of violence are often also commonly
placed in other, more direct kinds of political contexts depending upon the
ethnic identities of the persons involved in them. Interethnic relations have
become such a pervasive concern in contemporary societies that the inter
pretation of virtually any act of violence between persons identified as be
longing to different ethnic groups itself becomes a political act. But the
interpretive process is not only political; it also generates competing systems
of knowledge concerning interethnic relations, the sources of tension be
tween members of ethnic groups, the causes of discrimination and prejudice,
their social and economic bases, and the like. The developers of these sys
tems of knowledge generally claim to stand apart from and above the ethnic
interactions they seek to explain and to describe “objectively,” whereas in
fact they themselves play a role in their perpetuation by the very process of
placing interethnic incidents of violence in broader political contexts.
Interethnic incidents of violence in modem states invariably involve other
parties in addition to those who contextualize them in journalistic or social
scientific accounts, notably the authorities and especially the police. The
police often prefer to define local incidents of violence, whether between
members of different ethnic groups or not, simply as crimes and to treat
them as such, that is, to localize and confine them. Such localization, how
ever, becomes more difficult when isplated incidents of interethnic violence
become transformed into something broader, a “riot”, involving large num
bers of massed persons from opposing ethnic groups engaged in assaults on
persons, lives, and property. In such situations,, the police may themselves
take sides; even when they do not, ~they are often accused of doing so,
particularly by the side that emerges with the greater"losses. Some ethnic
“riots” do not even involve two ethnic groupS^but often Only one commu
nity and the police, with the latter perceived or.described by spokesmen for
the rioting community as responsible for the precipitating incidents leading
to the “riot.” When it can be proved that the police and the state authorities
5
TEXTANB CONTEXT
more broadly are directly implicated in a “riot” in which one community
provides the principal, or sole victims, then, of course, one is confronted
with a pogrom. .
The definition of occurrences of violence involving members of one or
more ethnic groups as being merely isolated incidents having no broader
significance or as being “riots1’ or pogroms is frequently itself a part of the
political struggle. The-boundaries between isolated incidents and proven po
groms are clear enough. However, those between local incidents of violence
and “riots,” on the onejiand, and between “riots” and pogroms, on the other
hand, are not. Some so-called riots are no different in origin from everyday
incidents of violence. Others, however^ may be pogroms in disguise.
Interethnic or police-people confrontations involving violence in contem
porary states almost always lead to the construction of interpretations of
them by authorities, media, politicians, and political activists. The struggles
to gain acceptance for particular constructions of violent and riotous behav
ior are.4nhebntly political, with important consequences for state policies
and resource distribution.2 The constructions that become officially or
broadly accepted are usually far removed from the actual precipitating inci
dents and from local interpretations of them. The scholar who inserts him
self into the description of such incidents in a search for objective truth can
do no better than to place himself on one side or another in the political
struggle. When the search for categories, constructs, and contexts is central
to the political struggle, the scholar’s own concepts and the scholar himself
cannot stand apart from and outside of them.
Where, then, can a scholar interested in questions of violence place him
self in relation to these constructions? One possible posture is to seek to
expose the falsifications contained in all of them. However, if one starts
with the premise that violence in which innocent persons are harmed and
killed is an evil, such a rhetorical strategy provides a poor vantage point.
One must, therefore, take a stand rather in relation to the whole process of
construction and contextualization. It is my purpose in this volume to find a
place to stand in relation to the contextualization of incidents of violence in
contemporary Indian society and to ask whether some kinds of constructions
contribute more and others less to their perpetuation.
Theory and Method
The focus of this book is on issues of ethnicity and violence and their rela
tionship to state-building and national unity in India. It is based on field
2 A point well made by Allen D. Grimshaw, “Three Views of Urban Violence: Civil Distur
bance, Racial Revolt, Class Assault,” in Allen D. Grimshaw, ed., Racial Violence in the
United States (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), p. 387. •.
6
CHAPTER 1
research carried out between 1982-83 and 1994 and on incidents that oc
curred between 1980.and 1994 at sites of police-public and interethnic vio
lence in north India, which in recent years has given all appearances of
undergoing the most extreme paroxysms of caste, communal, and other
forms of violence that appear to threaten the unity of the country and the
stability of the Indian state. The original research for this project in 1982-83
was carried out with no other intent at the time than to engage in the social
scientist’s conventional search for the truth of contemporary public violence
through the use of comparative case studies, one of the accepted methods of
the social science disciplines. A change in my design came afterward as I
looked over my interviews in new ways, treating them as “texts” subject to
multiple interpretations rather than as sources of valid or confirmed informa
tion or data about events.
I raise three questions concerning the increased incidence and intensity of
violence in India in recent years. The first concerns the relationship between
issues of ethnicity, communalism, and violence, on the one hand, and na
tional unity, on the other hand. To what extent does this upsurge in violence
and the specific forms it has taken indicate a serious threat to the continued
unity and integrity of the country and the relations among its major peoples?
Since questions of intercaste relations and even more of Hindu-Muslim rela
tions are at the heart of much of this upsurge in violence, the second ques
tion is why caste and communal riots persist in India. Third, why especially
have Hindu-Muslim riots become endemic? These three questions, I will
show, are interrelated.
The argument I develop is that the publicized versions of many so-called
caste and communal riots in India, like many aspects of ethnic identity it
self, are constructions upon events that are usually open to a multiplicity of
interpretations. When examined at the actual originating sites of ethnic and
communal violence, it is often the case that the precipitating incidents arise
out of situations that are either not inherently ethnic/communal in nature or
are ambiguous in character, that their transformation into caste or communal
incidents depends-upon the attitudes toward them taken by local politicians
and local representatives of state authority, and that their ultimate elevation
into grand communal confrontations, depends upon their- further reinterpreta
tion by the press and extralocal politicians and authorities. The “official”
interpretation that finally becomes universally acceptedjs often, if not usu5
ally, very far removed, often unrecognizable, from the original precipitating
events. This is particularly the case witETthose riots- thaUire labeled as “com
munal” or “Hindu-Muslim” riots. Indeed, I intend to demonstrate that the
persistence of riots so labeled is in large part a consequence of their func
tional utility for all dominant political ideologies^boih secular and commu
nal, in contemporary India. Their persistence helps locals state, and national
7
TEXT AND-CONTEXT
leaders of different ideological persuasions in capturing or maintaining insti
tutional and state power -by providing convenient scapegoats, the alleged
perpetrators of the events, and by providing as well dangers and tensions
useful in justifying the exercise of state authority.
The approach adopted here" is quite different-from the conventional social
science accounts of riots and their explanations, which are broadly of two
types. The first seeks to,develop from descriptions of riots at different times
and places an abstract, “objective” model of their sequential character. The
classic sequence in thejiterature on collective violence describes a pro
gression from the juxtaposition of opposed ethnic groups or one ethnic group
and the police to the creation of an'atmosphere of tension arising out of
grievances, conflicts, and frustrations followed by a triggering incident,
which then produces a conflagration as does a spark upon some combustible
material.3 This sequence is common also in popular and official accounts of
the development of riots in India.
The second general approach to the explanation of riots, particularly in
societies in which they are endemic or occur in “waves,” discards descrip
tion and dynamic analysis for ecological comparison, seeking to identify the
demographic, economic, and/or political conditions that distinguish cities
and towns in which riots have occurred from those in which they have not.
Such analyses usually produce tables and charts and ultimately regression
equations that account for a percentage of the variance ranging most often
from 25 percent to 50 percent, which is considered quite good in social
science statistics. Thus, for example, a conclusion may be reached that 40
percent of the riots in America or in India have occurred in cities and towns
where blacks and whites or Hindus and Muslims, respectively, live side by
side in a 40-60 ratio or some other proportion. Other characteristics are then
added to the regression equation that may increase the variance explained to
50 percent or sometimes even more. However far one goes, a substahtial
amount of the variance always remains unexplained.4 When one keeps in
mind that large numbers of people are being killed in those cities and towns
3 See esp. Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1962),
chap. 7; and the critique of the classical approach in Doug McAdam, Political Process and the
Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
chap. 1.
4 A classic study of this type for seventy-six American race riots between 1913 and 1963,
using the method of “paired comparisons” of riot and non-riot cities, is Stanley Lieberson and
Arnold R. Silverman, “The Precipitants and Underlying Conditions of Race Riots,” in
Grimshaw, Racial Violence in the United States, pp. 354-70. One finding, for example, con
cerned the hypothesis that a “rapid influx of Negroes” into cities was an underlying factor in
race riots, concerning which the authors reported that “in 56 percent of the comparisons the
control cities experienced greater percentage increases in Negro population than the riot cities
did” (p. 363).
8 CHAPTER 1
where the variance is unexplained, such forms of analysis provide cold com
fort even if there were some hope that the explanations of social scientists
could be translated into corrective public policies.
I have three objections to these alternative approaches. The first is that the
claim of objectivity is unsustainable. No academic accounts of riots I have
read are free of subjectivity. Second, these accounts, particularly the statisti
cal, but also the classical sequential model, eliminate agency and respon
sibility from their explanations. They objectify a sequence or a demographic
situation and fail to identify specific persons, groups, organizations, and
state agents, who actually inaugurate and sustain riotous events and commit
the arson, property destruction, and murder. Third, they fail to identify
clearly the linkages between individual and social responsibilities and those
of the state and society. Insofar as they do so, they tend to refer vaguely to
the existence in the minds and hearts of the people of prejudices and antipa
thies from which in turn state actors are not free. Such statements have a
pious ring to them, but they constitute smokescreens that mask persistent
forms of speech, social practice, and organizational activities and the ways
in which they form a net of complicity that may spread widely in societies.
In the research on the case studies for this volume, I found it impossible
to present an “objective” account that explained each case or all of them
fully, that is, which accounted for the event as a whole. Instead, I found
more or less persuasive and unpersuasive, more or less scrupulous or self
serving, more or less dispassionate or prejudiced accounts, some of which
contained elements of a whole “truth” of the event, but none that could
explain the whole. Nor could I free myself completely from my own West
ern rationalist skepticism, social science training, and personal biases in
seeking to construct a holistic account. At the same time, it was also evident
that the riotous events I have here documented were not primarily “sponta
neous” occurrences or chance happenings and that there were identifiable
culprits who had conspired to produce or who had committed acts either
designed to produce or whose effects were to produce riotous and murderous
results.
Social scientists are trained to be skeptical of conspiracy theories and to
leave the attachment of blame to journalists and the judicial system, but this
has too often led to the objectification otsocial processes and the reification
of categories such as class, ethnicity, or even “humaa^nature” in a fruitless
search for ultimate causes that ignores the dynaniics of events, the signifi
cance of the interpretations—more or less tendentious—which are presented
to “explain” them, and the uses to which* the events and their explanations
are put. I have in my accounts of riotous events in northern India, therefore,
chosen to focus on neither the remote nor the precipitating “causes” of them,
but on the action that occurs in the intermediate sjJace and time, the inter
pretations that follow after the events,-and, in the case of Hindu-Muslim
