Living with Violence

This book gives a detailed account of the ‘communal riots’ between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence.

Speaking to and interacting with the residents of Dharavi, the largest shanty town in the city, the authors collected a wide range of narrative accounts of the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. The authors juxtapose these narrative accounts with public documents exploring the role language, work, housing and rehabilitation have on the day-to-day life of people who live with violence.

Roma Chatterji teaches at the Department of sociology, Delhi University. Apart from her research in the subject of the state and everyday life, her interests are in folklore and print culture, governmentality, illness narratives and folk art. She has published in edited volumes and journals of international repute, and has recently completed a monograph on folklore and print culture in West Bengal.

Deepak Mehta is at the Department of Sociology, Delhi University. He works on Muslim societies in India and on the sociology of material culture. Dr Mehta is the author of Work, Ritual Biography: A Muslim Community in North India.