Routine violence
Subtitle: nations, fragments, histories
By: Gyanendra Pandey
Series: Cultural memory in the present
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
Subjects: Political violence; Minorities; Discrimination; Toleration; Political violence -- India
Description: 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 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-220) and index
Table of contents: title: Introduction: negotiating the boundaries of political violence; title: In defense of the fragment; title: Appendix to Chapter 2: Reply to a right-wing journalist; title: The nation and its past; title: Monumental history; title: Appendix to Chapter 4: Ayodhya and the state; title: The question of belonging; title: Marked and unmarked citizens; title: Cognizing community; title: The secular state?