Rural Impressions on the Urban Communal Carnage

Abstract The recent wave of communalism in India has to be contextualised in the milieu where people live and work. Coming from Surat, where the pogrom carried out on Muslims was barely over, I retreated at the beginning of January 1993 to the villages of my ongoing fieldwork in the countryside of South Gujarat. In my diary I wrote down how the locals reacted to the riots which again broke out in Bombay. The argument is that communalism is not a social force which from far-away and above finally also reaches the rural grassroots but represents a tidal groundswell moving up and out in the other direction.