In my last post I touched on one criticism of existing explanations for ethnic violence in India: almost all analyses in reality only touch on Hindu-Muslim violence while ignoring (more prevalent) caste violence. Today I want to touch on another criticism: ignoring almost two hundred years of British colonialism.
When reading some of the foundational works on ethnic violence in India (see my last post), you almost get the feeling like colonialism didn’t happen. This is not to suggest that writers like Brass, Wilkinson and Varshney are necessarily wrong to ignore colonialism and instead focus on recent developments. But to me, this is the difference between proximate and underlying causes. I’m interested more in the latter.
For example, Varshney explains variations in ethnic violence today by referring to the character of associational life in India. Where interethnic organizations exist, communal peace exists. Where they do not, communal violence often occurs. The underlying (surprisingly unasked) question here is: what explains why interethnic associations only sprang up in certain areas?
My hypothesis is that interethnic associations preliminary sprang up in the princely states (areas of colonial India governed by native princes instead of British administrators), whereas ‘divide and rule’ (allow me to indulge some of my Hindi training to write this in the Devanagari script: फूट डालो, राज करो. There, now I feel like I learned something) policies in the British provinces (areas of direct British administration) led to interethnic associations. Although the British provinces contained somewhere between 60-75% of the population, former British provinces today account for 90% of all Hindu-Muslim violence (I’m expanding this analysis to include caste at the moment).
So part of the ‘value added’ of my dissertation will be to utilize a comparative historical framework to seek the underlying causes of ethnic violence in India. More to come later…
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