ABSTRACT
By analysing government documents on violence under study and the reports of some major riots that took place elsewhere in the country since the colonial period, this chapter exposes how the locally embedded violence among two distinctive minority groups in the micro-setting of the coastal areas of Thiruvananthapuram is inscribed into the prototypical document writing on Hindu-Muslim riots. The chapter attempts a nuanced approach which is not explored in any previous study on government documents; that is, a particular classificatory practice prevalent in document-making, which this study calls ‘party formation’.
