Mirrors of violence : communities, riots and survivors in South Asia

Abstract

There are three sorts of essays in this volume. The first looks in general at the nature of violence during riots and contextualizes this within social systems that comprise, for instance, religion, politics and the individual unconscious. The second examines more specifically at particular riots - such as riots against Tamils in Colombo, Sikhs in Delhi and Muhajirs in Karachi - and seeks to understand the event in its distinctive peculiarity and concreteness, so that general arguments about communal or ethnic violence can be given body and form. The third kind of essay describes the experience of various survivors, their emotional states and the processes of strategies by which they have come to terms with, or slowly reconstructed, their shattered worlds.