[Book Review] Political change in times of 24x7 television

Review of Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change, edited by Somnath Batabyal, Angad Chowdhry, Meenu Gaur, and Matti Pohjonen, Routledge, 2011 In 2008, as America cheered and roared for change, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an African father and a Caucasian mother, became the 44th President of the United States of America. Considering the blood splattered, radically disturbing history of the country, this indeed was a huge change. The world looked on in awe and wonder, hanging on to each word spoken by the man who many believed had irrevocably changed race relations in not only the United States but globally. Such dramatic political change seldom seen in the post-Cold War period made academicians and media pundits sit up and take notice of the subtle yet effective way in which real attitudinal change had taken place. In fact, the hope and optimism grew to such proportions that warranted a President, who was simultaneously fighting two wars, to be given the Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of a radical shift in future foreign policy. Today, the very future of our planet is on the brink as we battle not only the reality but the abstract notion of change. At a recently concluded conference on climate change, the negotiations ended on a note not of agreement but stalemate on how much nations were willing to change in order to reverse the pattern of climate change. The last two general elections in India were fought on the agenda of change—change for the better. Interestingly, the results of the first one reversed the fortunes of the then ruling party and the second one brought the incumbents back to power stubbing the very metaphor of change in the face. As the voices around the concept of change grow louder and shriller, the examination of how much and to what extent the mass media is responding to political transformation becomes the need of the hour. A routine flip-through of the myriad news channels that dot the firmament of the Indian media industry is enough to understand the extent to which certain changes are taking place; a recent instance being the media circus that was played out on all channels, including the so-called elite, urbane, English language news channels such as NDTV 24X7, Times Now, Headlines Today, and CNN-IBN, concerning the standoff between the Indian government and the gregarious crowd-puller, Baba Ramdev. One has to only watch the news channels with some degree of continuation to gauge the depth to which each of the competitors will plunge to go one up on competition. If news channels have traversed beyond redemption on their quest to the top, other forms of the media too have responded to the slow yet steady political change that has swept the country. Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change, edited by Somnath Batabyal, Angad Chowdhry, Meenu Gaur, and Matti Pohjonen, collects essays on such responses and presents them in the form of an extremely readable volume. The book begins by examining the various methods in which the Indian news media conducts kangaroo court trials in full public view even before the real upholders of justice pronounce their verdict, in full evidence in the manner in which the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks have been presented and the debates conducted by the media. John Hutnyk, in his essay on the news television in India, compares the images of terror inflicted on the psyche of the viewer on an hourly basis to the advent of the Kali Yuga for the mass media. The definition of the Kali Yuga narrated by Sumit Sarkar in his treatise Beyond Nationalist Frames: relocating postmodernism, hindutva, history, as he draws from the Mahabharata takes into account all strands of human behaviour, positive or otherwise, to definitively create the imagery of the Kali Yuga in the form of disorders in nature, oppressive alien kings, Brahmans corrupted by too much rationalistic debate, overmighty Shudras no longer serving their caste superiors, and women choosing their own partners, disobeying and deceiving husbands, and having intercourse with menials, slaves and even animals. Hutnyk posits this imagery of the Kali Yuga to articulate his statement on the state of televised news media as we see the news not as realist commentary on what is going on, but as commentary within frames. He calls this Maya. Illusion. The chapter studies how the malevolent power of television, as a system of images, as representation and network, as imaginary, permeates understanding and shapes a kind of state-sponsored or endorsed cosmology of fear and anxiety, as seen in the nation and even worldwide. The news media thrives on this culture of fear. The author quotes CNN-IBN Managing Editor Rajdeep Sardesai as saying that TV is now increasingly entertainment and so is news; fear too has become part of this package of entertainment that is beamed into our living rooms every single day. In his bird’s eye look at the nitty gritty of how news is produced, Somnath Batabyal draws on extensive ethnographic work on two Indian television channels, Star News and Star Ananda and makes the case for a detailed analysis of how the liberalization of the Indian economy has changed news production practices in India. Amidst the unprecedented explosions of news channels in India, the national project is now being re-imagined in complex ways within these very practices where the Sales, Marketing, Research and Human Resources departments battle for editorial control of what is ‘news’. Behind these fragmented and conflicting narratives of change within the newsroom, the article warns, are increasingly corrosive ways through which the corporate policies of Indian television are taking over the production of news content, thus, providing a snapshot of broader commercialization and corporatization of the national project of India itself. Meenu Gaur’s article looks in detail at one of the key aspects of the imagination of change in India: through its cinema. The article focuses on the popular yet critically acclaimed film Roja and makes a case for a more contextual analysis of positioning films in the broader teleological narratives of change and how the Indian nation is imagined vis-à-vis its relationship to secularism. A close reading of the film tells us how the Hindu right has reared its head in India as a political force and looks closely at the limits of Indian secularism itself where the Muslim is seen as the ‘national failure’. Such periodization of films in relation to national events, in this case the Kashmir crisis, is problematic in understanding films as they often force the more polyphonous readings of films into simple narratives of change. At the micro level, the nuances of the practices in films made in B-town India are the focus of attention for Ratnakar Tripathy and Jitender Verma, who reflect on Bhojpuri cinema, music and language. Dwelling specifically on the role that the emergence of the Bhojpuri cinema and music has had in the construction of the Bihari identity and its many contradictions, the article looks at the complex nexus of language politics, poverty, regionalism and migration taking place in contemporary India. The article sees these representations as reflecting the core anxieties, dilemmas and despair of a changing India, especially outside its metropolitan centres. In his article on sex in the metropolitan centres, Angad Chowdhry looks at the different ways in which the hysteria over youth sexuality has been implicated in how change is imagined. Taking into account the various instances of MMS scandals and the ways in which people have used mobile phones to record themselves having sex, the article looks at how the shifting ways of adolescent sexual practices, technological mediations and moral panic about these, interact in complex ways. Kriti Kapila’s structured articulation of the ways in which sexuality is represented in the mainstream media attempts to understand the hidden meanings in the first ever major sex survey in India, where much-debated changes to Indian sexual norms are looked at critically as examples of how statistics and other narratives of change are used to produced the impossible object of Indian sexuality and intimacy by the mass media. Moving away from sexuality, Angad Chowdhry and Aditya Sarkar look at the complicated ways in which politics and change interact. It focuses on the phantasmagoric representations of change in the Obama and the BJP’s electoral campaigns and the complex labour politics of the mills in Mumbai, the articles takes on a ghostly narrative of how historical events should be understood in the present analysis. The book also gives credence to rapid changes in the digital media (naturally important in this digital age) and how they have problematized both academic research into these technologies as well as the practice behind creating them. The article argues that because of the speed of development, we need to come up with a new method of creative experimentation to keep up with the pace of change. In his tribute to the work of the exemplary journalist P Sainath and his theories of the ‘other’ India which is seldom represented on television screens and on celluloid, Naresh Fernandes argues that hidden somewhere behind the glitzy images of conspicuous middle class consumption and prosperity, remains a vast barren India with depressing levels of poverty. This is the mass reality of Indian which has been largely forgotten by the corporatized mass media. A volume of immense value to students of the mass media and those interested in the finer aspects that make up this behemoth known as mass culture, the book could have done with a more careful reading, especially with regard to the language. A number of readers, for instance, would find it difficult to distinguish the meaning of ‘electorate campaign’ from ‘electoral campaign’.

[Book Review] Bollywood theory revisited

Review of Reframing Bollywood: theories of popular Hindi cinema by Ajay Gehlawat, Sage, 2010 At the outset, it would perhaps be apt to say that in order to locate the origin of a theory in the larger universe of an existing, living, dynamic realm of identification, construction, and production of culture in the form of moving images, film in other words, it becomes increasingly necessary to substantively define or describe the nomenclature ascribed to the industry that produces mainstream, popular films in Hindi. The popular Hindi film industry, or Bollywood, a moniker that brings together the place of production—Bombay or Mumbai—and the nature of cinema produced—often described as formula-based or masala productions—that depend on straight-jacketed storylines and characterizations. Reframing Bollywood: theories of popular Hindi cinema by Ajay Gehlawat attempts, from the introductory chapter itself, to put forth a comprehensive and susbstantive definition of the term Bollywood and its production. The fact that the Bombay film industry is now being viewed as an important site for the production of cultural artifacts with worldwide influence, especially on the Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani-speaking communities, not only located in South Asia, but across the world, places the focal lens squarely on the existing theories that govern the modes of production as well as the nature, conscience, and the impact of the product, which in this case are films. Gehlawat in his book refers to the almost two dozen theories that have emerged over the last few decades and their corresponding theorists who attempt to categorically deconstruct the term Bollywood and provide a standard definition of this relatively newly constituted field of cultural production. While theorists, such as Ranjani Mazumdar and Wimal Dissanayake resist the temptation of designating Bollywood cinema as ‘India’s national cinema’ (Mazumdar 2007; Dissanayake 2003), it does emerge from the writings of others such as S Gopal and S Moorti that the Hindi film industry is unquestionably nationally dominant. Some see it as a trivializing, pejorative, and dismissive term, exemplified by the fact that till recently, scholarship on Bollywood was considered an academic non-entity as Bollywood itself was relegated to a B-grade sphere. In the course of the book, Gehlawat notes and rightly so that the Bollywood film is a particularly hybrid art form, blending theatrical and cinematic elements as well as First World and Third World cinema methodologies, plus an assortment of Western and indigenous genres, such as the musical, dance drama, and melodrama, to name a few. This mix, known in Bollywoodian terms as masala, has been critiqued by film-makers and theorists alike, including Satyajit Ray who described the viewership of this genre as ‘tired untutored minds with undeveloped tastes’ (Ray 1976). Sudhir Kakar, in the 1980s termed popular films as ‘infantile’ and ‘escapist’ (Kakar 1989). In order to liberate the study of Bollywood from these theoretical constraints, the author attempts to take a first step towards situating it in a filmic paradigm. He takes recourse to Christian Metz and his contention of cinematic voyeurism (Metz 1982) as well as Sumita Chakravarty’s metaphor of ‘impersonation’ (Chakravarty 1993) to locate Bollywood films in the sphere of film theory. He attempts to develop the concept of ‘impersonation’ as applied by Chakravarty as a method of constructing a narrative of Indian popular cinema and national identity, and take it further and use it in a way of problematizing the concept of national identity and indeed Bollywood as a national discourse. Gehlawat considers it more effective to see Bollywood as engaging in what Baudrillard (1987) terms ‘ecstacy’, that is, the simultaneous transcendence and dissolution of a form, through the trope of spicy mixing of genres, or masala, that the typical Bollywood film indulges in. Reframing Bollywood within such a postmodern frame produces a conception of ‘Indianness’ rooted in a dialectics that undermine the polarizing oppositions that critics continue to associate with its internal and external structures. Such an exposition embraces the hybrid nature of Bollywood cinema and celebrates what critics and theorists have been designating as ‘contamination’ of the genre. The author, furthermore, in the process of reframing Bollywood in such a manner, develops a new relationship between popular Hindi cinema and theories of post-coloniality. Each chapter of the book addresses a specific theme, whereby controversial and problematic theorization is revoked and analysed in depth. In exploring how theatrical and religious paradigms are utilized by theorists of Bollywood, Gehlawat, in the first chapter, concerns himself with the way in which Bollywood films create private spaces in which erotic encounters frequently occur, thus contradicting the logic of the devotional paradigm, which considers such depictions taboo. Further, he presents the Bollywood song and dance sequence as a more radical form of narrative interruption than its Hollywood counterpart in the second chapter titled ‘The Bollywood Song and Dance, or Making a Culinary Theatre from Dung-cakes and Dust’. This chapter closely compares Hollywood musicals with Bollywood films, taking examples, such as Dil Se (1998) and Aa Ab Laut Chalein (1999), examining how Bollywood song and dance sequences differ in crucial ways in their structuring than Hollywood musicals. Moving ahead from the previous two chapters, but at the same time building on them, Gehlawat analyses the alleged oral nature of Bollywood cinema and states that these films perform a crucial role in promoting rural literacy, often viewed by large masses of Indian subalterns living in rural and semi-rural conglomerations. In doing so, this chapter applies key concepts from postcolonial theory to the study of Bollywood, challenging several key premises underlying the discourse of subaltern studies, through a close reading of sequences from the classical 1965 film, Guide. The emergence of a homosexual subtext in contemporary Bollywood cinema, with Kal Ho Na Ho (2003) and Dostana (2008) as case studies, is the key point of reference in the chapter ‘Ho Naa Ho: the emergence of a homosexual subtext in Bollywood’. In the process, this chapter reconsiders recent scholarship on this subject, particularly Gayatri Gopinath’s book Impossible Desires (2005), by questioning the implied repudiation of homosexuality in popular Indian culture, arguing instead that recent Bollywood films engage in such homosexual subtexts both knowingly and playfully. The chapter also draws upon Judith Butler’s concept of ‘gender parody’ to reveal and simultaneously destabilize the larger ambivalence existing within Bollywood cinema, which on the one hand recognizes homosexual elements, but at the same time on the other hand, stresses upon its heteronormativity. The book concludes with a chapter focussing on the recent phenomenon of ‘crossover Bollywood’ cinema and reformulates notions of Indianness and Bollywood itself in an era of the non-resident Indian. It avoids invoking classical nationalist paradigms and argues that Bollywood has been instrumental in creating more fluid and transnational forms of cultural identity in the 21st century. Even as Gehlawat considers and studies specific paradigms in each of the chapters, one single underlying thread that runs through the book is a close focus on the song and dance sequence in the Bollywood film, whether as a private realm, as a form of narrative interruption, as a method of reorienting both film and viewer, as a queer moment in an otherwise straight narrative, or as a supra-space which enables characters to traverse the globe. The book designates the song and dance sequence as a reframing device, which allows the films and their characters to rearticulate their visions and desires, and enables the viewer to indulge in a bit of both. Gehlawat, therefore, argues the Hindi films without the song and dance sequences would not be considered Bollywood films. Reframing Bollywood opens up Bollywood to a multiplicity of meanings that challenge hegemonic claims regarding its composition and implied modes of spectatorship, and in this way repudiating any one fixed, essentialized meaning. It offers a series of oppositional views of Bollywood films and its implied audiences and of the latter’s interaction with the former. A hyperkinetic cinema, such as Bollywood requires the process of reframing, which in cinema parlance means being mobile, stands opposed to static or the frame. This study successfully draws attention to all those elements that have been overlooked by previous and continuing theorizations and provides an understated methodology that looks to transcend and dissolve the very notion of essential otherness. Of immense use to scholars of cinema and students of media studies, this book is an intervention that will greatly and definitely benefit the ever-expanding universe of scholarship on popular Hindi cinema.

[Book Review] Representing trauma

Review of Mourning the Nation: Indian cinema in the wake of Partition by Bhaskar Sarkar, Orient Blackswan, 2009 Representation, of all genres and kinds, in the media and elsewhere take on a meaning outside the boundaries of human discourse and behaviour. It takes on greater and more worthy connotations as the process subsumes the depiction of communities, both communal and caste, genders, sexualities, including various marginal groups and collectivities. Similarly, representation in cinema too presupposes its role both as a mirror of the social milieu and as creating or constructing identities. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued that contemporary media shapes identities. By facilitating an engagement by distant peoples, the media “deterritorializes” the process of imagining communities. The form of representation in cinema, particularly mainstream, also undergoes changes as time passes and the epochs change, as articulated by Andrew Spicer in his study of masculinity in British cinema through the War and the post-War years. In the 1920s and 30s, two forms of the male were prevalent on the British silver screen—the debonair gentleman and the alternative, working class buffoon. Mainstream Hollywood cinema’s attempts at portrayal and representation could be gauged from the narrative of Barry Levinson’s 1996 classic—Sleepers. The film sensitively moves through the autobiographical story by American novelist Lorenzo Carcaterra as it examines the representation of male rape. One of the finest and few films to venture into the analysis of sexual brutality and forced penetration, Sleepers is a laboratory for the study of how sexual violence is represented in film. Closer to the Indian experience, a number of films, released after the landmark year, 1947, have depicted and represented the calamitous vivisection of the sub-continental mainland into what was then claimed as the Hindu India and the Muslim Pakistan. While M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) tells the story of the tribulations of Hindu and Muslim families tied together by years of amity and trust suddenly having to defend their honour against those who were friends and peers, B R Chopra’s Naya Daur (1957) pits traditional knowledge and technology against the markers of modernity in the backdrop of the bloodsoaked independence. Mourning the Nation: Indian cinema in the wake of Partition by Bhaskar Sarkar traverses familiar territory by studying the concept of mourning in Indian cinema in the post-Partition period, but does so through a careful examination of not only films but also Tamas, a serialized narrative on the brutalities of the Partition based on Bhisham Sahani’s novel of the same name. The book endeavours to trace the depiction of the historical event through the following five decades. It also investigates the notion of nationalism as identity movements continue to rage across the world, the most recent examples coming from North African states such as Tunisia and Egypt where largely youth-driven movements succeeded in deposing dictatorial and brutal presidential regimes. Even though the contexts are different, the arguments for freedom and recognition of identities and freedoms remains the same. The author posits the argument that the partition of India is a particularly harrowing moment within a larger trauma of the Indian modern, especially within the larger canvas of the postcolonial states such as India. The agency postulated in favour of the act of imagination of a nation, particularly in the Indian context takes on a larger role. This process of imagination, which forms the centerpiece of the Indian nationalist movement, aided and abetted greatly by the proliferation of print capitalism across the sub-continent also reflects in the portrayal of the post-independence developments and the tryst with modernity in Indian cinema. Interestingly, the symbolism of freedom is almost entirely punctuated by a sense of loss and deep sadness. The language of mourning is also comparable and similar in various cinematic examples, negotiated through the use of words such as sadma, chot, aghat, and so on. The hermeneutics of mourning thus takes on the Freudian principle of delayed consequences of trauma, reflected in five decades of Indian films. In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1995), the author finds a Western parallel for the unfolding of the effects of collective trauma as time passes. He differentiates between the various forms that the act of mourning can take—explicit or subterranean, direct or displaced. The process of mourning moves from understanding, memorializing and finally, overcoming loss. To solidify his argument, the author begins his academic exercise by tracing the earliest presence of the Partition in films, both documentary and mainstream. He begins with Shabnam (1948), a Filmistan Studio production and The Agony of the Partition, produced by the Films Division in the same year. While Shabnam articulated the trauma of the Partition through the rhetorical image of a child on the back of a donkey even though the film per se had little to do with the Partition. In the post-independence period, films generally undertook a hegemonic project of representing the essential markers of nation building, which was carried out through a careful strategy of influence and imagination. Thus, Indian cinema, or Bombay cinema in particular, set off a project of creating a national culture. Filmindia, the popular magazine from Bombay, hailed cinema in 1948 as a “medium that can, and should, be the eyes and ears of the nation”. Hindi cinema experienced the results of its nation-building role through popular music, an integral part of the Hindi film narrative. The popularization of classical forms of music lent gravity to the claims put forward by the Hindi film project that a hegemonic discourse had to be supported and deployed for the purpose of constructing a culturally unified nation. The year after independence, 1948 also witnessed the successful run of Raj Kapoor’s Aag, which posited a mature protagonist against the haloed precincts of the Indian education system inherited from the British, who walks away and discovers his true talents in the world of theatre and drama. The film celebrated the breakaway, rebellious hero and as a result provided a new allegory of independence. The act of walking away and charting his own course lends itself to a rather momentous description—the process of nation building required throwing away the yoke of colonialism and embracing freedom in all its glory. In the 1950s and 60s, only a handful of films addressed Partition directly and at length, notable among them being, Lahore (1949), Nastik (1954), and Chhalia (1960). These films reframed cultural memory to uphold particular versions of identity, community and nationality. A notable fact described by the author captures the essence of the turmoil that the partition brought about in the Bombay film industry in the form of the letters received by the magazine Filmindia from its readers who worried about the whereabouts of Muslim actors and film-makers such as Noor Jehan and music composers Ghulam Haider, who ultimately migrated to Pakistan. Kashmir emerged as focus of not only a vituperative political debate but a tumultuous reminder that representation in cinema holds within its process the creation of new and distinctive narratives. A film titled Kashmir (1950) extolled a virulent brand of Indian nationalism to counter the dispute over the province, echoes of which could be heard in Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992) and the more recent Lamha (2010). The project of building a nation found resonance in the development of Bengali cinema through the general recognition of a national imperative to develop a vital cultural field, including a representative cinema, as part of wider attempts to consolidate nationhood. Bengal, which saw itself as a cultural construct different from the Hindi film industry moved towards building a strong culture industry. In view of this argument of building a strong culture, the choice of what should or should not be represented gained an impervious importance. This process of “selective representation” became critical in establishing the parameters of a national culture. The conflict between the Bombay and the Bengali film industries could be viewed as the central message of the Hindi film Samadhi (1949), a film that depicted the life and times of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Doyens of Bengali films have since claimed that Bombay films have misrepresented Bose in more ways than one and have consequently presented him as a larger than life figure in Bengali-language cinema. Through the analysis of Nastik and Dharmaputra (1961), the author explicates the mode of representation of violence during partition. Both films present communal violence in brief, stylized scenes, the shift from a realist to a consciously presentational mode, sidestepping ethical problems associated with screen representations of brutality still raw in popular memory. Lahore went a step further, stayed away from directly portraying violence on screen and rather dwelt on the subjective dimensions of human suffering as a result of Partition. Later, Garam Hawa predicated the disastrous impacts of the partition on the lives of a large Muslim family living in Agra. A tale of two brothers posits one against the other as they battle circumstances, impulses, and finally violence. The book also includes a specific examination of Govind Nihalani’s Tamas primarily because of the longevity principle. While a film lasts for three hours, Tamas was a five-hour long television miniseries, thus reaching out to many more viewers. This ensured a continuum and a steady transmission of messages through the film. Also the fact that the miniseries was aired on television four decades after the Partition makes the impact an example of direct yet displaced trauma. Through television, the brutality and the violence was brought back into the lives of the viewers, perhaps as an attempt to collective coming to terms with the trauma of the partition. The book also seeks to engage the conceptual underpinnings of processes such as globalization and religious nationalism through the act of mourning the past. (The review was first published in The Book Review, Vol. XXXV, Number 3, March 2011)

[Book Review] Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim violence and the Indian state

Ward Berenschot, Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim violence and the Indian state (London: Hurst and Company, 2011], ISBN 978-1-84904-136-2, xi + 236 pp., Price £ 25.00 Compared to almost 30 years spent in the largely riot-free capital, Delhi, I lived in the communal riot-prone Ahmedabad city for less than three years and this doesn’t put me in any pedestal of authority to review Ward Berenschot’s scholarly ethnographic work of relative significance in a hugely volatile present. I review Riot Politics in relation to works on communal and collective violence in South Asia by scholars such as Paul R Brass (The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India and Theft of an Idol) and Steven Wilkinson (Religious Politics and Communal Violence). While Brass has studied the regularity with which communal violence between Hindus and Muslims and anti-Muslim pogroms have occurred since Independence, Wilkinson takes recourse to in-depth field studies to ascertain that the transformation of a communal skirmish into a full-scale riot, in large measure, is aided and abetted by the inaction of the political class and the administrative machinery to reap electoral harvest. He asserts that the worst riots have taken place in India since representative government was established in the mid-1930s and they have largely occurred because elected state governments were openly partisan or because, for political reasons, they delayed taking action to prevent the violence and encouraged hesitation among the district officials. Instances such as the pre-Partition violence in Calcutta in 1946, the Bombay riots of 1992-93, the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, and the anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom of 2002, among others, validate Wilkinson’s assertion. Using a restrictive definition of riot-proneness, yet another study by Ashutosh Varshney and Wilkinson pointed out that the incidence of communal riots is skewed towards urban India in general and towards 24 cities in particular. This, however, does not establish that the rest of India remains riot-free. The study provides statistical evidence to prove that since the worst-hit cities are scattered across India, communal riots are endemic to the country. Brass further complicates the discussion by raising a pertinent question—why is a violent situation, where the number of Muslims killed, particularly by police bullets, is disproportionately more than the number of Hindus, termed a riot and not a pogrom based on religion? He states that the master narrative of communal violence in India rests on two assumptions. First, riots are spontaneous acts by motivated and angry groups. Second, such situations arise out of the prejudices and hostilities between the two communities. In several of his works, Brass demonstrates conclusively that the above explanation is by no means satisfactory for large-scale Hindu-Muslim violence or anti-Muslim pogroms. Berenschot enters the arena of scholarship on communal violence in India with his interesting work Riot Politics. He claims to provide a novel approach to understanding the processes that lead to the violent outbursts of communal strife. The work is based on an elaborate fieldwork comprising interviews and conversations with a number of local Gujaratis in the Isanpur locality of Ahmedabad city, where some of the worst riots occurred in 2002. Significantly, the conversations suggest that the violence in 2002 was in fact a planned and organized event coordinated by a relatively small group of people. In stating this, the author rarely goes beyond what has already been made amply clear by scholars like Brass, Wilkinson, and Varshney –that communal violence in India is an event organized with electoral and political gains in sight, which also perhaps explains the larger number of Muslims killed in all such incidents. Berenschot’s book carries many fascinating snippets of his conversations with local social workers-turned-rioters and other witnesses who provide verbal evidence of the involvement of VHP and BJP workers in riots. The author’s argument relies heavily on his exploration of the nexus between politicians, state officials, and musclemen, called bahubalis or goondas. He contends that these local musclemen are employed by participant politicians, who foster them to foment and instigate riots and rioters –a fact that, I am afraid, has already been made by scholars, journalists, documentary and creative film-makers. Riot Politics, therefore, studies the Gujarat riots in great detail and builds on the existing arguments, but does not really break new ground. The book’s value lies in its meticulously collected rich ethnographic data.