The Imminence of Violence: Communal Conflicts in Contemporary Indian English Fiction

The paper explores the representation of communal riots in Indian English fiction, focusing on the depiction of the precarity of Muslims in post-2014 India. India has a long history of communal conflicts, starting with its independence in 1947. Indian English fiction’s engagement with the concept of India continues to develop, as it addresses grievances arising from an increasingly ethnic democracy characterised by communal tensions. We analyse these novels with help from the literature on riots, especially by Gyanendra Pandey and Paul R. Brass. While many novels have depicted the communal conflicts of the period, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020) and Devika Rege’s Quarterlife (2023) expose how the institutionalised riot systems operate with identitarian political parties controlling and making use of the conflicts by alluding to true incidents from India’s recent past. These novels also underline the importance of fiction as counternarratives to the ‘official’ accounts of such conflicts.