A series of communal riots between Hindus and Muslims that rocked Bombay after the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992 shattered the long cherished cosmopolitanism of the city. Why did India’s commercial capital and premier modern metropolis go up in flames? What fueled the communal divide? In Wages of Violence, Thomas Blom Hansen seeks to locate the communal fault lines in the city and how they have been produced and in the process illuminate the transformation of political culture in India.

Focusing on the rise and entrenchment of the Shiv Sena (a Hindu nativist political organization named after the 17th-century Maratha warrior-king, Shivaji) in Bombay, Hansen analyzes “the historical formation of the political discourses, the identities, and the conflicts that changed Bombay from being the preeminent symbol of India’s secular, industrial modernity to become a powerful symbol of the very crisis of this vision” (p. 8). Hansen’s attention to historically constituted discourses of vernacular identity, grassroots-level organization of the Sena in the city, and the Shiv Sena’s desire to refashion the modern in their nativist image locates the upsurge of communal violence not in an aberrant or pathological discourse but in an idiom of plebeian politics.

The reversal in Bombay’s identity, Hansen suggests, was manifest in the city’s renaming as Mumbai in November 1995 by a Shiv Sena–led government that had come to power in Maharashtra earlier in the year. The naming was symptomatic of an assertion of vernacular identity that had taken root during the course of the movement for a united Maharashtra based on the Marathi language. As Hansen puts it, “the change of the name was a rather straightforward assertion of the nativist agenda of claiming Bombay and all its symbols of modernity and power to be the natural property of local Marathi speakers, which Shiv Sena had been pursuing since its inception in 1966” (p. 3). What this claim glossed was that “most Marathi speakers were as alien in the city as everybody else” (p. 3). The vernacular appropriation of the modern was an effort to domesticate the alien urban space of Bombay, which was dominated by a cosmopolitan, non-Marathi commercial elite. In this urban landscape Maharashtrians remained the distinct underdogs.

Hansen explains how the categories invoked by the Sena to assert their identity were flexible and fluid in their historical context. The identification of the caste category “Maratha” with Maharashtra derived from the valorization of a non-Brahmin past that construed the Kunbi-Maratha peasant caste constellation as bahujan (the majority) in contrast to the elite shetji-bhatji (merchant moneylender–Brahmin) combine. The porousness of the category “Maratha” enabled the Sena to claim representation of the majority in the state and to speak on behalf of the Marathi manus (ordinary Marathi speakers) .

In the Muslim mohalla (neighborhood), as the textile mills closed during the 1970s, skilled Muslim weavers from north India lost their jobs. As a result, they became self-employed or migrated to the Gulf countries for work. Among the former were some who inhabited the twilight zone between legality and illegality, provoking the image of the Muslim badmashes (rogue-criminals). After the bomb blasts in Bombay in March 1993, the figure of the Muslim mafia don, promoting terrorism in league with the enemy across the border, acquired mythical proportions. It is this refashioning and reformulation of identities that Hansen underscores.

The growth of the Shiv Sena announced the “decline of an older political culture that espoused paternalist social and cultural incorporation of the large majority of the population into a highly unequal system of political clientelism” (p. 9). In its place emerged a plebeian political culture manifested in the local dadas (strongmen), who were also the local chiefs of the Sena shakhas (branches). It was through these local branches that the Sena maintained its ties with the people even during its lean years (ch. 4).

Initially the Sena’s battles were with the non-Maharashtrians who controlled not only Bombay’s economic resources but also the white-collar jobs. It was to displace the south Indian white-collar workers and the bhaiyyas (migrant blue-collar workers from north India) that the Shiv Sena launched its violent crusade in the late 1960s. For about a decade beginning in 1975 the organization was relegated to the background of Maharashtra politics as a result of its leader Bal Thackeray’s political misjudgement. However, during this interregnum the Sena consolidated its local branch organizations. A spate of communal riots in the early 1980s in towns like Pune, Sholapur, Malegaon, and Bhiwandi enabled the Sena activists to appear as the saviors of the Hindus and revived their flagging political fortunes. At the same time, Sena volunteers were enthusiastic participants in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)–led Ramjanambhumi movement in Ayodhya that led to the wrecking of the Babri mosque. This Sena turn against the Muslims bore political results when the organization won the elections to the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1985.

Although Hansen proposes a seamless continuity in the Shiv Sena’s social imaginary of xenophobia and nativism, its hostility toward Muslims can hardly be understood without taking into account the neoliberal restructuring of industries in Bombay, as well as the fight against terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The closure of industries led not only to large-scale job losses but also to a shrinkage of institutionalized social space, the habitations of secular social interaction. A steady withdrawal of the state from its welfare functions in postcolonial society further contracted the space of social equality maintained by the right to collective bargaining in the formal industrial sector. The divergence between democracy and equality marked this moment of transition and led to the emergence of an ethnoreligious political culture.

Collective identities are not permanent fixtures; they change and have to be reinvented. Referring to the renaming of Bombay, Hansen reminds us of ŽZi?zek’s contention that “proper names do not describe objects or places” (p. 2). It is through naming that the identity of an object is established. Thus “constant reiteration…stabilizes the imputed properties of a place” (p. 2). The need for reiteration implies an inherent instability of naming, and the fragility of identities and calls for public rituals like the ganapatiutsav (worship of elephant-headed Lord Ganesh) or performative practices like the maha aratis (public mass prayers) at the local level to reassert and represent collective identities. In these rituals and performances the role of the Shiv Sena branch leader, or dada, is crucial in sustaining identities and instituting a plebeian political culture.

Hansen argues that the Shiv Sena’s articulation of a plebeian political culture conforms to Partha Chatterjee’s demarcation between civil and political society (pp. 229-230). Whereas the former comprises the realm of rule-governed negotiations in a legal framework, the latter domain consists of a more chaotic process of negotiations contesting “existing rule in the broadest sense … to make a community or cause as visible as possible in order to claim certain benefits, public services or entitlements” (p. 230). It is this expansive realm of populist protest that organizations like the Shiv Sena inhabit, deploying a language of demonstrative violence as part of their political culture. Such mobilizations speak to a fracture in India’s postcolonial polity; Hansen has innovatively mapped its contours for Mumbai.