ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|19 pages

Introduction

Genealogies of violence in South Asia

part I|60 pages

Structural violence

chapter 2|14 pages

Neither war nor peace

Political order and post-conflict violence in Nepal

chapter 3|15 pages

Caste violence

Free speech or atrocity?

chapter 5|14 pages

Mapping extraordinary measures

Militarisation and political resistance in Kashmir

part II|44 pages

Gendered violence

chapter 6|17 pages

Sex, rape, representation

Cultures of sexual violence in contemporary India

chapter 7|15 pages

Biographies of violence and the violence of biographies

Writing about rape in Pakistan

chapter 8|10 pages

Violence in public spaces

Security and agency of women in West Bengal

part III|49 pages

Outsourced violence

chapter 9|17 pages

Violence and perilous trans-borderal journeys

The Rohingyas as the nowhere-nation precariat 1

chapter 10|16 pages

India’s lynchings

Ordinary crimes, rough justice or command hate crimes?

part IV|63 pages

Cultures of violence

chapter 12|15 pages

Afghanistan

Military occupation, violence and ethnocracy