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The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, by Paul R. Brass. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 476 pp. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-295-98258-6.
Paul Brass is the leading specialist on Indian politics among American political scientists. He has been doing research on elections and political violence in Aligarh, a north Indian town, since 1961, and this book is perhaps the most extensive analysis to date of Hindu-Muslim violence in a large Indian town. In this important book, Brass has collected a quite astounding amount of material on elections, caste politics, and the geography of riots and their morphology. The book contains a wealth of detailed observations about political parties, economic actors, and developments, as well as the geography of rioting, which makes it a landmark study of South Asian politics.
Brass discusses in detail several causal explanations for the occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots but comes to the conclusion that not one of them is sufficient. He wants to draw our attention to the functions of an existing...