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Ordinary People and Extraordinary Violence in South Asia: How Neighbours Become Killers: Partition, Genocide, and the Architecture of Mass Atrocity

    The crucial question is not why some people become killers, but why, under certain conditions, killing becomes ordinary. — Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992)     The Familiar Face of Violence Imagine, for a moment, a village. It does not matter which village — in the Punjab of 1947 or the fields of East Pakistan in 1971, the contours are remarkably similar. There is a well at the center, shared by all. There are fields that flood together and drought together. There are marriages across lanes, loans repaid over seasons, and feuds resolved over shared plates of food. The village is, in anthropological terms, what Victor Turner called a communitas — a structure of mutual obligation, identity, and reciprocity that gives human life its texture and meaning. Now imagine that within seventy-two hours, that same village is on fire. The same hands that drew water from the shared well are now drawing blood. The same men who at...
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THE PYRE AND THE WIDOW: History and Anthropology of Sati

  I want you to imagine something before we begin. Not a battlefield, not a palace — just a riverbank, at dusk, somewhere in northern India. Perhaps it is the year 1820. Perhaps earlier. A woman — she may be thirty years old, or she may be seventeen — sits near a pyre that is already burning. Her husband died yesterday. She is dressed in the finest clothes her family owns. Her hands are steady. Around her, a crowd of hundreds has gathered: relatives, priests, neighbors, strangers. There is music. There are chants. There is, in some accounts, the smell of camphor and clarified butter rising with the smoke. And then — she enters the fire.   That image — its horror and its strange, terrible dignity — has haunted two centuries of historians, anthropologists, colonial administrators, feminist theorists, and ordinary readers. It is the image we are here to examine today. Not to sensationalize it. Not to pass easy judgment on an ancient society from the comfortable distance...
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