Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject - community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of 'event' and 'interpretation', the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted, by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it.

This is a radically new analysis of communalism along with nationalism and colonialism. It is a part of a larger exercise aimed at understanding the construction of Indian society, and politics in recent times by challenging the conventional analysis of communalism and providing alternative theoretical cues to grasp its nature and dynamics. The book also explores how nationalism and communalism are constructed out of shared as well as contested experiences and out of common and mutually contradictory visions and struggles. It is a milestone in contemporary debates on nationalist policies and modern political communities. Given the worldwide resurgence of religious nationalism and communalism, this new edition reopens many of the questions signalled in the first edition and carries the discussion forward. The centenary edition contains a new Foreword. This book will be an important reading for scholars, teachers, and students of modern Indian history. It will also interest sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists.

This new edition containing a preface and afterword, is a part of a larger exercise aimed at understanding the construction of Indian society, and politics as a whole in recent times by challenging the conventional analysis of communalism and providing alternative theoretical cues to grasp its nature and dynamics.