ABSTRACT
Constructing a political community self-conscious of its identity and capable of making successful political demands depends on a leader’s skill at making objective differences between that group and other groups matter. Without understanding the political context, the actors jockeying for position before the elections and what they stood to gain or lose from the riot, as well as the discursive process in which these actors articulated this identity in contest with each other, it is impossible to understand why particular outbreaks occurred when and where they did. In the communal outbreaks that followed the mid-1920s, the representation of violence took on a critical political role. Through rumor and political propaganda, leaders on both sides sought to portray the other community as the aggressor and their own as the victim. Having popularized a certain construction of Hindu, political leaders on both sides found themselves limited in their ability to draw on symbols other than those that evoked polarization and exclusion.
