Salah Punathil’s book, Interrogating Communalism, is an important addition to the literature on violence and inter-community relations in India. This book explores the century-old history of hostility and inter-communal violence between two fishing communities – Marakkaya Muslims and Mukkuvar Christians – in Thiruvananthapuram, the southernmost district of Kerala. It questions, quite accurately, the taken for granted notion of ‘mobilization of religious identity’ implicit in India’s discourse on communal violence. Taking a cue from Rogers Brubaker (2006), Salah argues that violence between two different communities can occur without the mobilization of their attributed identity. Exploring the inter-communal violence between these two fishing communities, the book shows that the mobilizations against the ‘other’ were centred on the questions of space and scarce resources of livelihood rather than the other’s religious identity. Thus, the existing frameworks to study communal violence fails to understand the real dynamics of violence between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars due to its preoccupation with the notion of ‘mobilization of religious identity.’ Lack of attention to violence’s spatial dynamics is a major limitation of many studies on inter-community violence in India.

The introductory chapter consists of a review of the existing academic scholarship on communal violence in India and the methodological aspects of the current study. The first section reviews the colonial, postcolonial, Marxist, instrumentalist, and psychoanalytical perspectives on communal violence in India. It shows that all these perspectives failed to ask whether violence between two religious communities can happen without mobilization based on religious identity. Preoccupied with the notion of religious identity mobilization, they failed to address the spatial dynamics entangled in the discourse of communal violence. The second section elaborates on the methodological aspects of this study. The book points out the futility of the binary of archival research and ethnography in social science research today. The author does not limit himself to his meticulous ethnographic work on the coastal regions of Thiruvananthapuram, such as Vizhinjam and Beemapalli, and incorporates interesting archival sources as government reports, judicial documents etc. to make sense of the historical and the sociological dimensions of violence between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars. 

The second chapter engages with the riot discourses and tries to understand how state reports reinforce the problematic orientalist/nationalist notions of ‘communal.’ Critically examining the government reports and archival sources on the violence between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars, Salah argues that even the locally specific violence is framed in the dominant Hindu-Muslim violence perspective which has a problematic colonial genealogy. Judicial discourse and state reportage of violence between two religious communities try to normalize the illegal state violence and state role in constructing that violence. The book extends the argument of Thomas Bloom Hansen (2001) that there is a performative aspect in the public documents prepared by governments. It tries to cover the image of neutrality and rationality of the state. State’s role in the reification of Marakkaya-Mukkuva identities is something that can’t be neglected. The following chapters problematize government reports of violence that marks the conflict between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars as essentially religious.

Focusing on the history of inter-community violence in Vizhinjam, the third chapter constructs a local history of violence against the dominant historiography of communalism in India. While the state narratives identified Marakkaya-Mukkuva conflict as essentially communal, with a critical reading of the archives and the help of ethnographic study, the conflicts that emerged between these two communities were more or less the result of the contestations over land and scarce resources. The conflict between these two communities has a history starting from the colonial era. It was in the colonial period Vizhinjam seashore became a contested space over the coastal commons. There is a ‘political ecology’ aspect for the conflict/violence in this region that hasn’t get much attention in the academic discourses. Contestation between these two communities led to small violent conflicts and later to the consolidation of Marakkayar Muslims and Mukkuvar Christians’ group identities. In the first half of the 20th century, these two groups formed an antagonistic ethnic enclave with clear spatial boundaries and “relatively autonomous economic and cultural spheres”.

The following chapter explores how structural violence pervades in the coastal villages of Vizhinjam after independence. This was mainly a consequence of the modernization of fishing. Two contesting forms of fishing— modern and mechanized means of fishing by Mukkuvars and the traditional means of fishing by Marakkayars— created a tension in the seashore. Interestingly, this contestation over space was not limited to the seashore but also the sea. There was an imagined spatial boundary in the sea that separated the space of Mukkuvars from Marakkayars. Since this was imagined and thus blurred, there were often conflicts over the ‘possession’ of space between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars. While modernization of fishing helped Mukkuvars establish themselves as the most powerful community, Marakkayars, who failed to modernize and mechanize fishing, had to move out of fishing and gradually found different occupations. The majority of them migrated to Gulf countries to earn a better living. This differential productivity also created tension between these communities, which resulted in many violent conflicts.

Many of the Marakkayars moved out of the traditional fishing occupation started retail shops that sell television sets, tape recorders, etc., bought from Gulf countries. This took the shape of an informal market or black market that sells illegal items. It is then considered as a site of illegality that carried various forms of stigmas. The popular and mainstream discourses constructed Beemapalli as a “dangerous” place. This has resulted in transforming the Marakkaya community in Beemapalli from an ethnic enclave to a ghetto. The ghettoized identity of Marakkayar Muslims emerged out of multiple forms of stigmas created by the state and the “mainstream” by reproducing various stereotypes about Muslims in Beemapalli. In 2009, Beemapalli witnessed a communal conflict between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars, resulting in the police firing and killing 6 Marakkayar Muslims. Salah, oscillating between “the judicial discourses on violence [Beemapalli police firing] and ethnography of [that] event,” shows how the state legitimizes its violence against the Marakkaya community by reproducing these stigmas.

The concluding chapter reiterates this book’s central thesis: Existing approaches to understand communal violence are inherently limited because of its preoccupation with the notion of the ‘mobilization of religious identity’ during the violence. This has led to overlooking the various other reasons for violence, such as spatial contestations between communities for scarce resources. Studying the long history of the Marakkayar-Mukkuva conflict, this book “interrogates” the dominant historiographies of communal violence in India. Moving beyond the historical study vs field research binary, Salah blends his scrupulous ethnography with archival sources to make a wider understanding of the past and present of the violence between Marakkayars and Mukkuvars. With a novel approach, he persuasively argues that violence is not just a “community experience” but also a “spatial experience” – i.e., violence is also embedded in space.

This book is a relevant addition to the literature on communal violence in India. It challenges the commonsensical and academic impressions of communal violence in India, on the one hand, and the pacifist claims about Kerala, which overlooked the history of violence in the coastal belts, on the other. It urges us to revisit the nuances and complexities of the communalism discourse in India.

References:

Brubaker, R. (2006). Ethnicity Without Groups. Harvard University Press.

Hansen, T. B. (2001). Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton University Press.

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Navaneeth is a Master’s student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hyderabad, India.