Meena Menon, in her book Riots and After in Mumbai: Revisiting a City in Conflict in 1992–93 (published by Yoda Press in 2024), has done a meticulous job of documenting the varied incidents that led to and happened during what is collectively referred to as the Mumbai riots of 1992–93. Her years of work as a journalist have led to not just immensely powerful and poignant recording of events but also a lucid explanation of why and how things unfolded across India and culminated in the gruesome carnage in Mumbai that rocked the country and severely threatened the idea of its secular fabric. No wonder then, that this brilliant book was published by Sage Publications in 2012, and later acquired and published by Yoda Press, in 2024, with more nuanced perspectives.
At first, the text of the book comes across as a long essay of several case studies from different geographical areas of Mumbai, which have a somewhat similar narration of violence, with the difference being the number of dead and injured. Just when you begin to think you have read it all before, Menon takes you by surprise with her enhanced sense of detail and sensitivity in describing a particular incident.
Setting the context for the riots, the author writes, “However, this was not the first time Ayodhya was chosen as a target of Hindu revivalism. The first attempt to exploit the issue of Ayodhya, was in 1853 when Bairagis (Hindu ascetics) claimed the Babri Masjid was built on Ram’s birthplace and demanded a temple be built which was refused by the British authorities as the mosque was close by. But, in 1949, two years after Independence, in December someone placed idols of Ram Lalla and others in the mosque, setting off a well-documented chain of events” (Jaffrelot 1999: 92, 93).
The author has set Mumbai within its demographic, geographical, social, cultural, economic and political context, thereby setting the ground for the reader to understand its placement in its entirety. Alongside, with a clever disposition, she has interspersed the past to explain to the reader the linkages amongst several events across many years and how they led to the riots. “That a faraway mosque’s fate would be intricately connected with violence in Mumbai was unthinkable and no one in the city in their wildest dreams could envisage the brutality of those days. The city was riven and people left in hordes packing into overflowing trains, fearing for their lives. Many who left, stayed away and some were reported missing long after the violence ended.”
The book is divided into eight chapters and with an Introduction. While on the one side, the text is heavy with ‘facts’ quoted from the Srikrishna Commission Report, newspaper articles, books and research papers written about the 1992–93 Mumbai riots by journalists, researchers and academics, on the other hand, it is also a testimonial to stories of courage, and of kindness. In the author’s own words, “This book was intended as an exploration or a journey into the history of communal violence in Bombay city, and connecting it with a contemporary reality to understand identity and alienation and the survival of communities after violence.”
The book explores deeply the theme of Hindu nationalism: “Over 80 years before the first riots between Hindus and Muslims were recorded in Bombay in August 1893, Banaras in 1809 witnessed clashes over a temple, a precursor to the gamut of violence over religion which was only to intensify in the next century.” Starting with the Cow Protection Movement of the 1880s, the book maps the forming of the Sangh Parivar—the forming of the RSS in 1925, the VHP in 1964, and the Bharatiya Janata Sangh, which became the BJP, in 1980. Meanwhile, the creation of Pakistan and the proxy wars over Kashmir, the Shiv Sena, the Babri Masjid issue, and communal riots in Bombay since 1893 have all played their part.
Through the narration of incidents, and detailed individual instances as well the experiences of communities as a whole, the author has poignantly made a point: members of the Hindu community wreaked havoc on members of the Muslim community and vice versa, and at the same time, in numerous instances, members of the Muslim community helped their Hindu neighbours and vice versa.
Amidst the loss of livelihood, trust and dignity, there are stories of hope, of resilience, of rebuilding lives and, more importantly, rebuilding faith in life itself. Meena Menon’s book brings forth the irrepressible spirit of Bombay—to be able to mend, heal and bounce back—in the aftermath of not just 1992–93, but also the serial blasts of 1993, the train blasts of 2006, and the terror attack of 2008.
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Manisha Sobhrajani is an independent researcher and development sector worker.