Table Of ContentVIOLENCE IN SOUTH ASIA
This volume explores new perspectives on contemporary forms of violence in South Asia.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and case studies, it examines the infiltration of violence at the
societal level and affords a comparative regional analysis of its historical, cultural and geopolitical
origins in South Asia. Featuring essays from Sri Lanka to Nepal, and from Afghanistan to
Burma, it sheds light on issues as wide-ranging as lynching and mob justice, hate speech, caste
violence, gender-based violence and the plight of the Rohingyas, among others.
Lucid and engaging, this book will be an invaluable source of reference as well as
scholarship to students and researchers of postcolonial studies, anthropology, sociology,
cultural geography, minority studies, politics and gender studies.
Pavan Kumar Malreddy is a researcher in English literature at Goethe University
Frankfurt, Germany. He previously taught at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and
TU Chemnitz, Germany. His publications include Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism (2015)
and the co-edited collection Reworking Postcolonialism (2015). He has co-edited special issues
with the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012; 2020), ZAA: Journal of English and American
Studies (2014), Kairos and the European Journal of English Studies (2018), and has authored
essays on terrorism, political violence and postcolonial theory in The European Legacy, Third
World Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Intertexts, among others.
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is Professor at the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul
University, India. He was Fulbright Nehru Fellow 2018–19 at University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. His research focuses on postcolonial governmentality, citizenship rights, political
violence and the Anthropocene. His work appeared in International Journal of Zizek Studies,
Parallax, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, History and Sociology of South Asia, Postcolonial Studies,
Transnational Literature and Economic and Political Weekly, among others. He is co-editor of
Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium and is one of the founding members of the Postcolonial
Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS).
Birte Heidemann is Assistant Professor in English literature at Dresden University of
Technology, Germany. She previously held appointments at TU Chemnitz and University of
Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, and literary and cultural
expressions of post-conflict societies. She is the author of Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature
(2016) and co-editor of From Popular Goethe to Global Pop (2013), Reworking Postcolonialism
(2015) and two special editions of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her work has appeared in
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri and Postcolonial Text, among others.
“The strength of the book lies with its innovative conceptualisation and carefully
selected chapters, which are based on original material and ethnographic studies.
The volume captures the pulse of many contemporary issues being debated in
India, such as Maoist politics, incidents of lynching, new developments in Kashmir
and recent incidents of rape.”
– Ajay Gudavarthy, Jawaharlal Nehru University
“Whether there is more violence in South Asia today or whether it is just more vis-
ible, one cannot turn a page of a newspaper from the region without being struck
by words like ‘lynching’, ‘surgical strike’, ‘cow vigilantes’, along with the older ‘riot’,
‘acid attack’, ‘murder’, ‘rape’ etc. Hence, this book is an absolutely necessary and
very important scholarly intervention in South Asian literary and cultural studies.”
– Tabish Khair, Aarhus University
VIOLENCE IN SOUTH
ASIA
Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by
Pavan Kumar Malreddy,
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
and Birte Heidemann
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya
Sekhar Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and
Birte Heidemann to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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CONTENTS
List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction: genealogies of violence in South Asia 1
Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and
Birte Heidemann
PART I
Structural violence: ideologies, hierarchies and
symbolic acts 21
2 Neither war nor peace: political order and post-conflict
violence in Nepal 23
Julia Strasheim
3 Caste violence: free speech or atrocity? 37
K. Satyanarayana
4 The representational burden of ethno-nationalist violence
in Sri Lanka 52
Harshana Rambukwella
5 Mapping extraordinary measures: militarisation and
political resistance in Kashmir 67
Mohammed Sirajuddeen
vi Contents
PART II
Gendered violence: rape, misogyny and feminist
discourse 81
6 Sex, rape, representation: cultures of sexual violence in
contemporary India 83
Karen Gabriel
7 Biographies of violence and the violence of biographies:
writing about rape in Pakistan 100
Shazia Sadaf
8 Violence in public spaces: security and agency of women
in West Bengal 115
Sanchali Sarkar
PART III
Outsourced violence: mobs, insurgents and private
armies 125
9 Violence and perilous trans-borderal journeys: the
Rohingyas as the nowhere-nation precariat 127
Mursed Alam
10 India’s lynchings: ordinary crimes, rough justice or
command hate crimes? 144
Harsh Mander
11 Violence, neoliberal state and the dispossession of adivasis
in Central India 160
Ashok Kumbamu
PART IV
Cultures of violence: fractured histories, fissured
communities 175
12 Afghanistan: military occupation, violence and ethnocracy 177
Wahid Razi and James Goodman
13 Social roots of insurgency in Kashmir 192
Idreas Khandy
Contents vii
14 Islamist attacks against secular bloggers in Bangladesh 209
Ryan Shaffer
15 Democratic voice and the paradox of Nepal bandhas 224
Sally Carlton
Index 238
CONTRIBUTORS
Mursed Alam is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Gour College, Uni-
versity of Gour Banga, India. His areas of research include subaltern life and politics,
Islamic traditions in South Asia and the literary and cultural history of Bengali Muslims.
Sally Carlton is based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and works for Citizens
Advice Bureau providing settlement support to new migrants. Previously, she was a
Research Fellow through the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development pro-
gramme in Nepal working on the country’s troubled post-conflict present.
Karen Gabriel is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department at St.
Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India. She has published extensively on
issues of gender, sexuality, cinema, melodrama and the nation-state, including Melo-
drama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Bombay Cinema 1970–2000 (2010).
James Goodman is Professor in the Social and Political Sciences at the Univer-
sity of Technology Sydney, Australia. He currently researches issues of global and
climate justice and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global
Studies (forthcoming).
Idreas Khandy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and
Religion, Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on nationalism of nations
without states and incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to understand why
nationalism continues to hold emancipatory promise.
Ashok Kumbamu is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics at Mayo Clinic,
Rochester, USA. His research and teaching interests include critical development
studies, agrarian studies, social movements, environmental sociology and the sociol-
ogy of health and medicine.
Contributors ix
Harsh Mander is a human rights and peace worker, writer, researcher and teacher
who works with survivors of mass violence and hunger, homeless persons and street
children. He convenes and edits the India Exclusion Report. His latest publication
is Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India (2019).
Harshana Rambukwella is Director of the Postgraduate Institute of English, Open
University of Sri Lanka. He is the author of Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cul-
tural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (2018) and currently holds the Sri Lanka
Chair, University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Wahid Razi is lecturer and researcher at the University of Technology Sydney,
Australia. His work focuses on various issues in sociology and includes other fields
in social sciences such as politics, political sociology, history, anthropology and law.
Shazia Sadaf teaches Human Rights and Social Justice at the Institute of Inter-
disciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. She has published in various
journals, including Interventions and ARIEL.
Sanchali Sarkar is a researcher based in Kolkata, India. She was awarded the AUFF
PhD Screening Grant in 2018 to work at the Department of Global Studies at
Aarhus University, Denmark. Her perspective doctoral project concerns intersec-
tional feminist politics and mobility rights in India.
K. Satyanarayana is Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, English and
Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. His most recent publications are
the co-edited volumes Dalit Studies (2016) and Dalit Text: Politics and Aesthetics Re-
imagined (2019).
Ryan Shaffer is a writer and historian whose work focuses on Asian and European
history, with particular interest in extremism and political violence. He is the author
of Music, Youth and International Links in Post-War British Fascism: The Transformation
of Extremism (2017).
Mohammed Sirajuddeen holds a PhD from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawa-
harlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He visited the Palestine Territories,
Israel, the Kashmir Valley, Bastar, Germany, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for
research assignments.
Julia Strasheim is a researcher at the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Founda-
tion and research associate at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Stud-
ies, Hamburg, Germany. Her work on post-conflict peace processes appeared in the
Journal of Peace Research, Democratization and Cooperation and Conflict, among others.
