Introduction

This book makes two-fold claims: first, owing to changed roles of political parties, state, media and civil societies in postcolonial India, the forms of communalism have undergone a change compared to what it used to be during the 1930s and 1940s. Second, new conceptual tools and resources emanating from inter-disciplinary traditions are needed to advance our understanding of this puzzle. There is some evidence about this trend, though scant in nature, available in recent research. In an influential essay, ‘Secularist, Subalterns, and the Stigma of Communalism’, Ayesha Jalal calls for rethinking the notion of communalism. She writes:

If secularists still acknowledge the significance of historical context and contingent events albeit by re-affirming the stigma of communalism, the recent subaltern interventions deem pain and violence – the attended lives of ordinary people – to be far more important fact than the political fact of partition. The apparently irreconcilable, yet partially in imbricated, secularist, and subaltern positions with their loud claims and equally deafening silences afford an opportunity to rethink the notion of communalism (italics mine) and reappraise the debate over the history and meaning of Partition.