Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories

“Routine violence is violence that has sunk into a zone of indiscernibility between the unnoted and the legitimate. It must be described in detail to be lifted out of that zone. And those who do so must bring a spirituality to description that contests violence all the way down. In this superb history of routine violence in twentieth-century India, Gyan Pandey does just that.” —William E. Connolly,Johns Hopkins University
"This is a remarkably fine set of essays on the forms and conditions of violence in modern India by a distinguished historian...an impressive work of historical scholarship, excellently written and thought-provoking." —Talal Asad, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

This book investigates the ideological and political conditions that allow, and sanction, the undisguised political violence of our times. It is concerned with the regnant demands of nationalism and of history writing, and the unity and uniformity upon which these insist.

Gyanendra Pandey is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History at Emory University; a founder member of “Subaltern Studies”; and author of The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001) among other books.