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...