Mapping the contours of communal violence in India: A critical engagement with existing scholarship and emerging trends

Through this article, I seek to expound a series of concrete formulations and explanations about the nature and trajectory of communal violence in India. I wish to gauge a sense of the diverse factors which make communal violence possible, ascertain the underlying links which facilitate such periodic outbreaks, and identify the practices of exclusion and segregation which these instances engender. The article relies on a combination of written and oral sources: in addition to drawing on the existing corpus of literature, it taps into oral testimonies for creating a rich and varied archive of events and experiences.