3 Review(s)

This volume provides an examination of the major riots in Bengal between 1905 and 1947. It addresses the following issues: how an increased conjunction of elite and popular communalism created the necessary background for the riots; why the riots lost their initial class basis and became overtly communal; how a crowd-leadership dicotomy often asserted their "autonomy"; and finally, how the riots promoted communal consciousness at various levels of society and polity which provided an important backdrop to the partition of province in 1947.