ABSTRACT
On 11 August 1893, a Muslim congregation emerged from Friday noon prayers in Bombay’s Jama Masjid and rushed towards a nearby Hindu temple.1 At this, a small police party stationed in the vicinity sprang into action and tried to charge the congregants back towards the mosque. Their intervention provoked the ire of the crowd and soon a clash broke out. The policemen, as well as Hindu shopkeepers in the neighbourhood, were pelted ceaselessly with stones. When the Commissioner of Police rushed to the spot, he found that ‘The tumult was enormous; fighting and especially stone throwing, was going on in half a dozen different directions’. Thus began the bloodiest riot in the history of nineteenth-century Bombay.
