Book Review: Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231216103 |
| Author | Chulani Kodikara |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
damage of historicabuse, and yet to acknowledge thisfact can seem like a denial of the very
ideal of justice. Gallencaptures this sentiment in the suggestion that what is needed is rec-
ognition of justice as ‘hauntinglyinadequate’(p. 7). Acknowledgingthe limitations of tran-
sitional justice is a step towards re-orienting the idea of justice towards relationships, of
breaking the hold of attribution of individualised guilt for abuse on the collective imagin-
ation and moving towards a collective social responsibility for reckoning with the past.
This book provides a meticulously researched and compellingly argued framework for
thinking about these questions and for rethinking the very foundations of transitional
justice when it comes to historic abuse.
CATHERINE TURNER
Durham University, UK
ORCID iD
Catherine Turner https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7791-7122
MOYUKH CHATTERJEE, Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023, pp. 184, ISBN 9781478019964, $24.95 (pbk).
Moyukh Chatterjee’sComposing Violenceopens with a scene not unfamiliar to many of us
living in South Asia—corpses on the street; bodiesshrouded in white sheets; shops, garages
and houses reducedto charred black holes; and survivorslike ghosts amidst the carnage.He
is writing about Gujarat in the aftermath of the pogrom of 2002. Taking this scene as his
point of departure, Chatterjee asksus to consider the pogrom as a technologyof power and
what work it does in contemporary democratic politics. He suggests that such spectacular,
periodical violence whether in India or elsewhere, is not an aberration or an exception.
Rather, it is constitutive of majoritarian democratic politics.
When Chatterjee looks on the scene of the pogrom in Gujarat, he sees not only a scene
of destruction, death, violation, pain, trauma, and humiliation of Muslims. He sees also a
heterogeneous group of Hindu individuals divided by caste, class, language, and regional
differences jubilantly coming together as a mob to revel in violence against Muslims. He
then sees them unifying into an effective political community and Hindu nationalist
voting block for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its agenda of establishing a
Hindu Rashtra (nation) in India. In Chatterjee’s analysis, the pogrom, which happened
under the watch of Narendra Modi, the BJP Chief Minister of Gujarat and his subsequent
election as Prime Minister of India are not separate, disparate events but part of the same
logic of democracy as well as the mythical history of Hindu nationalism. The pogrom and
the election both equally energize, animate and constitute Hindu nationalist subjects,
while (re)producing the Hindus as the majority and the Muslims as the minority.
Impunity or the state’s refusal to hold to account the individual perpetrators of vio-
lence against Muslims in Gujarat is vital to this Hindu nationalist effort to produce an
effective, unified Hindu majority. Impunity is one of the threads that runs through the
substantive chapters of this book, where Chatterjee explores how the law repeatedly
674 Social & Legal Studies 33(4)
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