Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories

Much has been written about the extraordinary violence of recent history, its brutality, and the impossibility of describing it. Routine Violence focuses on the violence of much more routine political practices--the drawing up of political categories and the writing of national histories.

The book takes its material from the history of twentieth-century India: the land of Gandhi and of effective nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule. It asks questions about how particular histories are claimed as the real histories of a nation; how the sacred nation, and its (mainstream) culture and politics, come to be constructed; and how a certain inducement to violence, and a collective amnesia regarding that violence, follow from all of this.

This is the first book to engage in a sustained investigation of the routine political violence of our times.

No sales in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

Author: Gyanendra Pandey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 11/02/2005
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.98h x 6.12w x 0.55d
ISBN: 9780804752640

About the Author
Gyanendra Pandey is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History at Emory University; a founder member of Subaltern Studies; and author of The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001) among other books.

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