Paper short abstract:

I explore memories of specific events of religious violence across three different residential clusters in Mumbai. How does the Indian state feature in these memories? How does this influence people's sense of collective victimhood, if at all?

Paper long abstract:

In 1992-1993, Mumbai witnessed one of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots. Muslim victimhood in Mumbai has since been widely written about both in popular and in academic literature. In 1997, in Ramabai Nagar, a Dalit-Buddhist neighbourhood in Mumbai, 10 people were killed when the police opened fire against protestors. Although not as widely written about, this is a significant event in Dalit and Dalit-Buddhist collective history in Maharashtra. Twenty years on, how do people remember these events? In October 2016-April 2017, I conducted fieldwork in three different religious residential clusters in Mumbai. I identified Mumbra as a majority Muslim space, Dadar Parsi Colony as a majority Zoroastrian space and Gautam Nagar, Dadar as a majority Dalit-Buddhist space. My PhD project seeks to understand how the residents of these spaces remember these violent events. I interviewed people about their memories of these events. What are the different memories and narratives that exist about these events? Since this investigation was conducted twenty years after the fact, there were very few of my respondents who were directly affected by the violence. In this paper I wish to address the following questions. Which of these narratives engendered the sense of collective victimhood? And how does the perception of the role of the Indian state in these events feature in these narratives and memories?