The grey zone: the 'ordinary' violence of extraordinary times

The article analyses the 'ordinary' violence of revolutionary politics, particularly acts of gendered and sexual violence that tend to be neglected in the face of the 'extraordinariness' of political terror. Focusing on the extreme left Naxalbari movement of West Bengal, it points to those morally ambiguous 'grey zones' that confound the rigid distinctions between victim and victimizer in insurrectionary politics. Public and private recollections of sexual and gender-based injuries by women activists point to the complex intermeshing of different forms of violence (everyday, political, structural, symbolic) across 'safe' and 'unsafe' spaces, 'public' and 'private' worlds, and communities of trust and those of betrayal. In making sense of these memories and their largely secret or 'untellable' nature, the article places sexual violence on a continuum of multiple and interrelated forces that are both overt and symbolic, and include a society's ways of mourning some forms of violence and silencing others. The idea of a continuum explores the 'greyness' of violence as the very object of anthropological inquiry

The integration of the princely state of Hyderabad and the making of the postcolonial state in India, 1948-56

This article explores the impact of the police action and the anti-communist struggle in Hyderabad on the formation of the Indian state in the first years after independence. Because of its central location and diverse cultural heritage, the absorption of the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union was an important goal for Nehru's government. However, the task of bringing Hyderabad into the Union was not an easy one. As it entered Hyderabad, the government of independent India had to come to terms with the limitations of the police, military and bureaucracy, which it had inherited from the colonial state; and as it took over the governance of the state, it had to find ways to manage relations between Hindus and Muslims, even as the social order was being transformed. It also had to fight communism in the Telangana region of the state, whilst trying to ensure the loyalty of its new citizens. This article examines the ways in which India's first government confronted these complex problems. The following pages argue that these early years must be seen as a time of great dynamism, rather than as a period of stability inherited from the colonial state