Book review: Salah Punathil. 2019. Interrogating Communalism: Violence,Citizenship and Minorities in South India

As I write this book review in February 2020, Delhi is in the throes of possibly the worst communal conflict in its post-colonial history. According to official sources, nearly 50 people have been killed, and hundreds injured (local sources claim that the death toll is more than 200 people), in four days of arson and killing. India is a secular democracy and that is how the Constitution of India as well as its early leadership, the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi, as well the architect of the constitution B.R. Ambedkar envisaged the new nation. However, the country has struggled with violent communal flare-ups and tension, time and again in its history. At a time when India is witnessing such a gruesome communal carnage, that too in the capital of the country, it becomes compelling to understand the contours of communalism in India. It is time to revisit the complex and compelling subject of understanding communalism, or as the title of Salah Punathil’s book suggests: Interrogating Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India.

Punathil’s work is a timely and relevant addition to the scholarship on inter-community relations in India. This work would interest historians, political scientists, hardcore anthropologists who swear by thick descriptions and even economists who are interested in understanding technological transformations and the subsequent impact on livelihoods and occupations in modern India. While academics do talk about the compelling need for a sociology of Muslims in India and new and exciting works are being published on the diversity and variance of Indian Muslims, these studies are by no means exhaustive. Punathil’s book adds to this literature and is a very germane addition to this theme.

Based on his doctoral dissertation at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Punathil’s research is a fine work of scholarship which provides new insights into framing and addressing an old but very critical question, ‘Interrogating Communalism’. The book addresses the contours of conflict and violence between two fishing communities, the Marakkayar Muslims and the Mukkuvar Christians in the southern state of Kerala. By exploring the long history of violence among two distinctive fishing communities, the work problematises the taken-for-granted notion of mobilisation of religious identity implicit in the discourse on communal violence and foregrounds the spatial dynamics in violent conflicts which is the essential contribution of the work.

Interrogating Communalism covers a lot of ground in a slim volume of 145 pages. The book has six chapters. The Introduction starts with an overview of the academic discourse on communalism and violence between religious communities. Punathil reviews Marxist, instrumentalist, post-colonial and psychoanalytical perspectives on explaining communalism in India. He discusses the works of Bipan Chandra, Sudipta Kaviraj, Ashis Nandy, Akeel Bilgrami and Paul Brass as some of the key works that guided the academic discourse on communalism in India. He quotes Ashutosh Varshney’s (2002) much-cited concept of ‘inter community civic engagement’ which suggests that inter-religious manipulations and mobilisations are more likely where civic networks and engagements are missing. But Varshney’s analysis, according to Punathil, ignores spatial dynamics as a key factor in the presence or absence of civic engagement between communities (p. 7). The author argues that despite diverse accounts that address the communal idiom, the concept of mobilisation of communal identities remains unchallenged in existing theories. According to the author, sociologists and anthropologists have been ‘stunned’ by the spectacle of violence and hence produce a decontextualised explanation which, according to Punathil, is a ‘partial understanding of the socio political order’ (p. 10).

Punathil devotes the second chapter of the book, titled ‘State reportage, riot discourse and violence among minorities’, to analysing the use of the archives. This work is also significant because it raises the pertinent issue of using archives uncritically. Archives have been critiqued for ‘the production of colonial knowledge and the practice of its direct and indirect agents, and exclude the everyday micro-realities of violence as well as its subjects’. Furthermore, Punathil discusses the use of archives in the reproducing and reinforcing specific stereotypes and master narratives deployed on Muslims by the use of terms like ‘aggressor’, ‘fanatic’, ‘ferocious’ etc (pp. 31–32). The chapter also flags the pertinent and excessive (mis)use of state violence. The use of this narrative and these terms was evident in earlier riots in India as well as the ongoing violence in Delhi.

The next two chapters of the book take the reader to coastal Thiruvananthapuram and more particularly, Vizinjam village which is a specific research site for this study. Punathil gives a detailed and rich ethnography of the research site as well as the history of communal violence and the way space was central to the emergence of communal identities and conflict between the Marakkayar Muslims and Mukkuvar Christians. He explains the century-old persistent violent conflict between these two fishing communities. The supremacy of the Marakkayars was challenged by the Mukkuvars in the early 20^th century. Modernisation and mechanisation of fishing helped the Mukkuvars to become a powerful fishing community, while the Marakkayars moved out of the traditional occupation and gradually moved to the Gulf. Here he uses his empirical data to explain the criticality of spatial dynamics and the occupational contours of fishing in the coastal region of Kerala, a point that he raises in the theoretical chapter.

Chapter 5 shifts the location to Beemapalli, which is a part of the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation and hence is accessible to the city. The Marakkayars, many of whom had moved out of the traditional occupation of fishing, started a retail market selling electronic goods like television sets, video recorders etc., which they bought from the Gulf countries and sold at cheaper rates in Beemapalli. Over the years, Beemapalli was transformed from an ethnic enclave to a ghetto which carried multiple forms of stigma due to the informal market that developed in the area. The locality once again witnessed violence between the two communities in 2009. Despite the decline in spatial conflicts over fishing, Beemapalli became a site of conflict due to state intervention which played ‘a critical role in reifying group identity (p. 141).’

Apart from the relevance of the theme in contemporary times, the richness of the study lies in the meticulous ethnography as well as the careful use of the archives. Punathil’s work is rigorous and engaging and also gives the reader a visual understanding of his research with some good photographs by G. Pramod. A map locating the fieldwork site might have further enriched this book.