Riots, masculinity, and the desire for passions: North India 1917–1946

Abstract

This article aims at a threefold historicization of riots, drawing on sources depicting communal riots in North India in the twentieth century. (1) The concept of ‘crowd’ covers a large variety of phenomena. Rioting crowds could range from several tens of thousands, gathered at one place, to just a handful of men performing the actual arson and murder in the back-lanes. (2) Not all rioting crowds give rise to the same emotions. Research on riots often focus on anger and fear, but the sources frequently speak more about josh, about excitement, enthusiasm and fervour–emotions which participants in a riot felt they needed not only to experience, but to show, and proudly show. (3) Finally, the violence itself underwent decisive changes between the 1900s and the 1940s, not only it whom it addressed, but also in the weapons used and the forms of pain it aimed at inflicting. Taken together, the historicization of the crowd, emotions, and violence allows us to overcome a number of dichotomies: Between the riot that essentially always remains the same, and the riot that can only be viewed as a fragment; between the learned and the spontaneous; between emotions and interests, not only by showing that interests generate emotions, but also by showing that the actors had a vital desire to experience certain emotions, which would transform them and thus change the fate of their community. This does not depoliticize the research on riots, but it brings in politics in a more complex way than reducing deadly emotions to the manipulation of the elites.