Author: M J Akbar
Publisher: Roli Books
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 168
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8174362827
Description
With an introduction by Khushwant Singh, this collection reports on violence in a land formally pledged to Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence.
The author, one of India's best known journalists, visited numerous riot-torn cities, towns and villages - Jamshedpur, Moradabad, Sarhupur, Meerut - to discover what lay behind the outbreaks of communal and caste violence that have taken place in India after Partition. In riot after riot, he finds that the basic cause for the communal frenzy is the same: poverty, economic deprivation and a history which has been perverted and misused by religious zealots.
Akbar has the journalist's eye for the revealing instance, but he also possesses the historian's sense of the deeper trends - and he uses these gifts to provide an illuminating study of the violence beneath and on the surface of the land of Gandhi.
COMMENT:
Reading him a sheer delight.
= From the Introduction by Khushwant singh
Contents
Introduction
A Split-level War in Jamshedpur
Massacre in Moradabad
Have Gun, Will Kill
A Tale of Two Villages
Death had a Signature
The Spiders of Orissa
Revelations Down South
The Land of Seven Hundred Hills
The Tomb of the Eunuch
God's Martyrs
Gorkhaland's Historical Imperatives
The tyranny of the Failed Artiste
Meerut's Politics of Communalism
The Bonfires of the Heart: Notes from the Shadows of Ayodhya
The Hitler Nerve: Or Notes on Apocalypse Now