Of Mob and Madness: Mob Lynching in Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari's Chronicle of an Hour and a Half

The paper attempts to read the mob lynching that is portrayed in Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari’s novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, as a collective crime driven by sexual jealousy, applying the arguments postulated by Gustave Le Bon on crowd psychology and René Girard's idea of the scapegoat. The intersection of these two theoretical lenses gives a deep sense of understanding of the layered nature of mob lynching and how it is materialised in a normative modern society. By performing a close textual analysis of the novel, the paper attempts to look deeply into the formation of crowds, its unity, and the unseen factors that lead to the irreversible act of lynching.