Religion and Riots

Seven of the nine contributions to this collection of essays were presented as papers at a workshop held in Oxford in 2004, sponsored by the Coventry University South Asian Studies Centre and Balliol College, University of Oxford. Editor Ian Talbot, formerly director of the Coventry South Asian Studies Centre and presently Professor in the University of Southampton, offers a summation of the contributors’ findings that can scarcely surprise any honest person observing conditions of communal violence in contemporary India and Pakistan. He remarks first that ‘extended violent outbreaks’ in which communal identities are brought to the fore ‘usually occur with the acquiescence, if not the actual participation, of civil administration’; second, he claims that such outbreaks are rarely ‘spontaneous’ but instead are