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Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in

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Modern Asian Studies 32, 1 (1998), pp. 245–256.  1998 Cambridge University Press
Printed in the United Kingdom

Reviews

Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India,

1780–1870. By C. A. BAYLY. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
1996. Pp. xiv, 412.

In this book Professor Bayly suggests that the advantages which are usually
cited as having made possible the British conquest and dominion of India
were much enhanced by the access the British had to another vital resource:
information. As in his earlier writings, Bayly stresses the manifold continu-
ities between pre-colonial and British India, and he is therefore less interes-
ted in British constructions of India than in the relative ease with which
the British were able to engage with and eventually to control the already
existing Indian sources and networks of information. Bayly uses the concept
of the ‘information order’ as a heuristic device to understand an extremely
wide range of sources of formal and informal knowledge including the polit-
ical intelligence of the Indian states, the materia medica of Indian physicians,
the gossip of the women’s quarters and the bazaar, religious texts and mer-
chants’ economic knowledge.
Bayly sorts some of this mass of information into categories of affective
knowledge and patrimonial knowledge; the former derives from the rulers’
participation in moral communities of belief and marriage, the latter is the
‘deep knowledge’ of magnates and others which came from having a direct
ownership of property in a region. He argues that the British progressively
cut themselves off from these types of knowledge, turning instead to the
‘more routinised, abstract information’ of statistics and surveys, and thus
compromised their understanding of Indian society.
The nature of the Indian information order was such that the control
which the British had of it was only ever partial; Bayly argues that this
helps to explain both the failure of the British to predict the Rebellion in
1857 and the early rise and final success of Indian nationalism. He provides
evidence that those who early understood the importance of information to
the empire also understood that it would dictate the impermanence of
empire: ‘The Friend of India, remarked in 1836, echoing the administrator,
Sir John Malcolm, [that] ‘‘our Indian Empire is one of opinion’’ and ‘‘the
progress of knowledge would entail the separation of India from England’’ ’.
(p. 2)
In welcome contrast to other recent works on ‘‘colonial knowledge’’, Bayly
approaches his subject with respect for chronology and with sensitivity to
changes in the character and concerns of the subjects of his study over what
is a lengthy period. His concern with the indigenous information order is
apparent in his comment that ‘the introduction of the ‘‘knowledge is power’’
theme of Francis Bacon and Michel Foucault into Indian historiography,
alongside the behaviourist concept of ‘‘hybridisation’’, has sometimes served
0026–749X/98/$7.50+$0.10
245

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to marginalise Indians and their knowledge as thoroughly as the most hide-

bound colonial administrative history ever did.’ (p. 314)
Bayly begins with an account of the theory and practice of surveillance
and communication in pre-colonial India in which, unlike his later descrip-
tion of the early nineteenth-century Indian information order, he deals
mainly with the knowledge India’s ruling elite, especially the Muslim elite,
had of the country. It was these systems of knowledge which were of most
use to the British in their conquest of parts of India between 1785 and
1815. Bayly contrasts the success of this enterprise with the relative failure
of British attempts to advance into Nepal and Burma. These attempts were,
he argues, vitiated by a lack of the sort of intelligence which had been vital
in the earlier expansion in India. The information order that existed in
Nepal was both less sophisticated, in part because the terrain made com-
munication more difficult, and more resistant to British attempts to penet-
rate it, because of the relatively greater cohesion of the Gurkha polity.
Although Bayly states that it was not ‘because of any deficiency of patriot-
ism’ that ‘there failed to materialise a general alliance against the British’
in India (p. 97), he argues that the British ‘stereotyped construction of the
Nepali state as a barbarous tyranny from whose thrall the majority of the
hill population were waiting to be liberated’ meant that the British underes-
timated the degree of local patriotism and found ‘to their surprise, [that]
hill people rarely came to the help of the invaders unless they were paid to
do so’ (pp. 109–10). In Burma similar circumstances, compounded by ‘the
lack of a serious attempt to come to terms with the Burmese language’
(p. 118), resulted in a level of misunderstanding that not only made the
prosecution of war more difficult but, Bayly suggests, may have contributed,
through unfounded fears of ‘unlikely coalitions between the Burmese,
Ranjit Singh, the Marathas and Nepal’, to the decision to enter in the first
place into a war ‘difficult to explain in terms of economic imperialism’ (p.
113).
The book is also a study of social communication in India. Examination
of the self-understanding of Indian society reveals ‘a number of different
and overlapping idioms’ (p. 21). In addition to a purely empirical idiom in
which formal knowledge ‘was accumulated . . . in much the same way as the
future British conquerors were to do’ Bayly identifies an idiom of spiritual
anthropology, one of what he calls ‘moral ecology’, and one of genealogy.
He notes that the Indian elites ‘employed concepts of religious community,
caste and breeding to distinguish between their subjects’ and remarks that
‘India was thus essentialised and ‘‘othered’’ (to use the rebarbative modern
jargon) in the course of subjection by its Asian conquerors’ as well as by
subordinate kings and regional rulers. Still, Bayly suggests, there was ‘no
orientalism without fire’ for while pre-colonial Indians ‘created essentialisa-
tions of social types as freely as did later colonial administrators’ these were
not fixed in a rigid racial hierarchy (pp. 28–9).
In the central chapters of the book Bayly examines the information order
of north India under the British up to 1857. He shows that indigenous
communities of embodied knowledge participated in a public sphere of reli-
gious and political debate which transcended the bounds of caste, commun-

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ity and sect, and suggests that the study of these communities helps to
provide a longer perspective for the Indian nationalism of the later nine-
teenth century. While this period saw the introduction of new knowledge-
able institutions by the British, and a relative decline in importance of
the indigenous communities of embodied knowledge, Bayly argues that ‘the
colonial information order was erected on the foundations of its Indian
precursors’, albeit these were transformed by being ‘built into hierarchies
which reflected the world view of the Britons of the early nineteenth cen-
tury’ (p. 179). The knowledge the British had of India was not entirely the
result of a colonial imagination but was derived from Indian texts and
native informants; ‘The British, for instance, did not invent caste or con-
struct religious identities ex nihilo’ (p. 168). Nevertheless this process was
not the progressive accumulation of knowledge/power that it has been rep-
resented to be both by the orientalists themselves and by their twentieth-
century critics.1 Rather, colonial knowledge was ‘a body of competing and
fractious ideas, principles and rules-of-thumb’, which remained always
‘patchy, incomplete and liable to atrophy’. Bayly identifies a ‘zone of ignor-
ance’ generated by the limited extent to which British institutions were
able to penetrate the old intelligence communities and argues that it was
here that orientalist ‘stereotypes of Thugs, criminal guilds, religious fan-
atics and well-poisoners were hatched. In this space arose the information
panics which periodically convulsed expatriate British society’ (p. 143).
The fact that British knowledge of India was liable to atrophy, as it did
as a result of the withdrawal of a later generation of British colonial admin-
istrators from involvement with Indian religious institutions and other
sources of affective knowledge, means that we should beware of reading
later ideological representations of India back into the works of earlier
writers. For example, the prevalence in the 1830s of ‘disparaging and
racialist stereotypes’, noted by Bayly, reveals an antagonism which would
have been alien to earlier writers who found in William Jones’s speculations
about the connection between Sanskrit and European languages confirma-
tion of their belief that Asia and Europe were not radically different, but
part of a wider unity.2 Likewise Bayly warns against reading too much into
formal ‘orientalist texts, particularly those of a popular nature, [which]
quite often failed to transmit the relatively complex understanding of men
actually involved in the governance of India’ (p. 326).
Bayly’s explanation of the increasing currency of racialist stereotypes in
the 1830s, as the result of ‘economic and intellectual competition from
Indians’, is only partly convincing. He argues that ‘if Indians could now

1
See, for example, Ronald Inden’s statement that ‘the formation of Indological
discourse made it possible’ for ‘European scholars, traders, and administrators to
appropriate the power of Indians (not only the ‘masses’, but also the ‘elite’) to act
for themselves.’ (‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, MAS, 20, 3 (1986), p. 403).
2
See Hastings’s description of India as a ‘society with which we have been for ages
unconnected’ and his comment that ‘in respect of the general diffusion and common
participation of arts and sciences’, the world ‘may be considered as one community’.
(Letter to Nathaniel Smith prefixed to Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta (London,
1785), p. 7).

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share European knowledge through the press and public instruction, then,
paradoxically, the only justification for their subordination had to be their
racial and cultural inferiority’ (p. 219). However, the defence of British
commercial interests through ‘benevolent’ rule was and remained a more
convincing argument for controlling India than the supposed intellectual
superiority of Europe. Few writers complained about the diffusion of Euro-
pean knowledge among Indians in the way that traders bemoaned the
advantages of their Indian competitors.
The increasing reliance of the government after 1830 on statistical sur-
veys rather than human intelligence led to distortion as knowledge was
abstracted from the communities in which it was embodied. Bayly argues
that it is this process which constitutes ‘orientalism’, suggesting that ‘Ori-
entalism was a distorting mirror rather than a purely fictional construct’
(p. 173). Bayly contrasts the Raj with the Indian ideal of a virtuous kingdom
as ‘a repository of learning and godliness as well as a political organisation’
(p. 244) and suggests that the divorce of information from ‘godly wisdom’
contributed to dissent. Shortcomings in the British understanding of India
can have been at most an indirect cause of rebellion, by resulting in politic-
ally insensitive or strategically unwise acts. As Bayly notes, ‘Indian leaders
showed no abhorrence for the new media when they could control and
exploit them.’ (p. 330). That inadequate intelligence led to the failure to
anticipate the events of 1857 is more evident. Even so, the speed with which
the British were able to exchange information helped in the containment
and eventual suppression of the Rebellion. Bayly notes that ‘the disarming
of the Bengal Army sepoys in Lahore within twenty-four hours of the out-
break of the Mutiny in the Meerut Cantonment was a momentous strategic
success for the British’, made possible by ‘speedy and accurate intelligence’
(p. 317).
Bayly suggests that the Rebellion was to ‘a much greater extent than any
earlier Anglo-Indian encounter . . . a modern war of propaganda’ (p. 319).
The struggle for control of the information order was one which both the
British and the Indians entered into with gusto. However, while public
instruction had been a goal of the state since the 1830s the motives and
aims of the British in this struggle were by no means homogeneous, as is
starkly revealed by Bayly’s discussion of controversies in the disciplines of
astronomy, medicine, language and geography. For every evangelical who
was eager to use European advances in astronomy and geography to under-
mine paganism by revealing its sacred geography to be absurd or its astrolo-
gical predictions unreliable, there were others who sought rather to learn
from Indian science, especially medical science, and were keenly aware of
the lack of consensus in European scientific opinion. For all those who
regarded the securing of accurate information about India as a means of
securing the permanence of empire, there were others whose overriding
interest was in the extension of the empire of reason. Bayly cites Matthew
Edney’s analysis of the Survey of India as ‘a huge exercise in Newtonian
triumphalism’ in which ‘Empire was put to the service of the glories of
national science, rather than the opposite’. (p. 307).
These debates contributed to the growing awareness among Indians of
sciences such as astronomy as ‘a form of all-India public knowledge which

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transcended social status and region’ (p. 249); Indian astral knowledge
became ‘a source of pride for an emerging national consciousness’ (p. 263).
Likewise Bayly finds more than just traditional religious scruple in the com-
plaint of one European collector of Sanskrit manuscripts that his efforts
were frustrated by an Indian merchant who bought up manuscripts and
presented them to poor Brahmins. Rather, he suggests, it is evidence that
‘some Hindus already [at the beginning of the nineteenth century] regarded
Sanskrit learning as a precious resource of a national civilisation.’ (p. 255).
In the years after the Rebellion, the ‘increasing density of government
and its institutions naturally revealed to the British many smaller Indias’
(p. 352). However, Bayly writes: ‘Ultimately, it was social change which was
to make the British more knowledgeable about their Indian empire.’ (p.
335). This social change was the extension of the sort of information sys-
tems which had enabled the British to conquer India in the first place;
Bayly mentions the improvement of the postal system at sub-district level
and increased access, especially in rural areas, to ‘written media, print and
urban knowledge’.
Bayly suggests that the failure of the British to understand India dictated
the eventual demise of the Raj. But his own conclusions suggest that just
as it was ‘the informational sophistication of [pre-colonial] Indian society
and politics . . . which was India’s undoing’ (p. 96), so it might be said
that it was the transformation of that order as Indians appropriated the
instruments for the communication of information introduced by the Brit-
ish, that was the undoing of the Raj. Moreover, some elements of the British
understanding of India took on a reality as they were adopted by Indians.
So, for example, the assertion of India’s unity is one of the elements of
the British or Orientalist understandings of India that has attracted much
criticism as a construct which fails to represent Indian reality. However
Bayly comments that after the Rebellion the ‘new orientalism . . . picked
up on and manipulated certain Indian conceptions of internal difference
. . . [while] by contrast, Indians began to insist on the integrity and vitality
of their own society’ (p. 352). Indian thinkers began to envisage their local-
ities as part of an Indian nation. The Hindi press also played a role in
creating ‘a definite sense of the unity of culture and territory which was
ultimately Hindu’ (p. 345); Bayly cites as an example the subscription
movements initiated by wealthy people to respond to famines in distant
parts of India. This conception of India was clearly an important element
in the development of Indian nationalism.
Thus in this case it was the success of the British in selling an idea that
was part of their understanding of India, or alternatively the readiness of
Indian writers to affirm an element of that understanding, rather than the
failure of the British to understand India or the rejection by Indians of the
British understanding of India that contributed to the demise of the Raj.
Although Bayly is more concerned with day-to-day information and its
sources in India than with what he calls ‘the learned theories of orientalism’
he recognizes that he ‘has, inevitably, confronted aspects of the debate on
‘‘orientalism’’ ’ (p. 369) and we have already cited some relevant remarks.
As part of his concern to relate changes in the Indian information order to

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changes in the wider international information order, Bayly also seeks to

place ‘orientalism’ in a wider and richer context: ‘British attempts to
describe their Indian subjects in more rigid categories of race, religion and
region, for example, were inflected by an international information order
which mirrored the creation of a global economy and the rise of the nation
state. Orientalism, in Edward Said’s sense, was only one among a variety of
localised engagements between power and knowledge.’ (p. 143).
We have seen Bayly’s arguments for thinking that Europeans have not
been alone in ‘constructing’ India, and that ‘orientalism’ was not the only
mode in which the British engaged with India. On the latter point he could,
if anything, have gone further. Mentioning the founding of the Asiatic Soci-
ety of Bengal in 1784, he comments that the society ‘directed its attention
to the improvement of Indian learning for the purposes of governance’ (p.
53). However, as a statement of the ideals of the Asiatic Society this is
surely deficient. The broader concerns of the members of the Society have
been amply demonstrated by a number of writers. In a letter prefixed to
one of the founding works of Indology, Charles Wilkins’s translation of the
Bhagavad Gita, Warren Hastings writes: ‘Every accumulation of knowledge,
and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over
whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful
to the state’.3 A great deal of attention has been paid to this and other
statements like it from European writers on India, usually without any
attempt to go beyond their prima facie import. Hastings goes on to add that
the accumulation of knowledge ‘is the gain of humanity’. Hastings’s enthu-
siasm for the ‘reconciliation’ of ‘the people of England to the natives of
Hindostan’4 was not matched by the East India Company’s Court of Dir-
ectors and thus he may have been led to exaggerate the political utility of
orientalist scholarship in this letter to them. The degree to which this and
other statements are akin to more recent assertions by scholars in the
humanities of the ‘relevance’ of their work in the competition for funding
should not be underestimated. There is evidence that in India such argu-
ments began to wear thin, as the real strategic value of orientalist scholar-
ship became apparent.5
Bayly’s work is further evidence that ‘Orientalism’ was not characteristic
of all attempts by the British to understand India, still less the inevitable
result of the encounter between European minds and Asian reality, but was
rather characteristic of some writers, mostly from a particular phase in the
history of the later British empire. Nor is the tendency to essentialize, when
describing what is unfamiliar, unique to Europeans or to those who have

3
Hastings, op. cit., p. 13.
4
Letter to J. Scott, 9 Dec. 1784, quoted in P. J. Marshall, ‘Warren Hastings as
Scholar and Patron’ in A. Whiteman et al. (eds), Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants
(Oxford, 1973), p. 256.
5
See the tables outlining the expenditure of the College of Fort William and the
amount spent on literary patronage for the years 1812–1840 in David Kopf, British
Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance; the dynamics of Indian modernization, 1773–1835
(Berkeley, 1969), pp. 220 and 234. From a peak of 41,011 rupees in 1815 this
declined to nothing for the years following 1830.

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come under the influence of European thought. Moreover, where orientalist
stereotypes reared their ugly heads, this was not part of a co-ordinated
strategy for world hegemony, nor even the consequence of an existing
imbalance in power relations, but evidence, if anything, of the limitations
of the power/knowledge of their perpetrators. Orientalist stereotypes are
shown by Bayly to be ‘not tools of epistemological conquest, so much as
conceptual fig-leaves to conceal desperate ignorance.’ (p. 52).
Empire and Information is an impressive start to the new Cambridge series
of studies in Indian history and society; it deserves to fulfil the editors’ aim
of attracting for the series a readership wider than that concerned with
India alone.
University of Cambridge WILLIAM SWEETMAN

Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. By PETER VAN DER VEER.
University of California Press: Berkeley, etc. 1994. Pp. xvi, 247.

Peter van der Veer’s Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India is a
book of great ambition in its scope. It spans some four centuries or more of
Indian ‘religious’ history, some two centuries of the formation of ‘religious
nationalism’. The book is nonetheless centred round Ayodhya and Hin-
dutva. The author seeks to trace the transformation of ‘protonational feel-
ings of collective belonging’—the phrase is Eric Hobsbawm’s—into ‘reli-
gious nationalism’—van der Veer’s alternative to the term ‘communalism’.
Van der Veer argues that ‘the most important imaginings of the nation’
in India are ‘religious, not secular’. Secular nationalism did exist as an ideo-
logical force, but was never decisive: even Nehru’s version had to accept the
importance of the religious community. Gandhi, though pluralist, was not
‘secular’; he stood within the ‘Hindu discursive tradition’. In fact, except
for those of the Marxists, ‘Indian dreams of the nation always take religion
as one of the main aspects of national identity’. Even the state is not ‘secu-
lar’; rather, it intervenes as arbiter between conflicting ethnic or religious
identities (‘subnations’) to promote the idea of religious tolerance in a plur-
alistic society. Therefore, ‘nationalism’ and ‘communalism’ should not be
seen as ‘utterly opposed ideological forces’, but as ‘‘moderate’’ and ‘‘radical’’
tendencies within nationalism’. One must instead try to understand how
‘Hindu’ concepts and religious traditions have been ‘creatively used’ for the
construction of the idea of the ‘Indian nation’ (pp. 22–3, 12). In van der
Veer’s usage the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ almost imperceptibly merge,
with the consequent implication that the (South Asian?) ‘Muslim nation’ is
elsewhere.
Van der Veer finds ‘striking parallels . . . between the expansion of reli-
gious organizations and state formation, and between the formation of reli-
gious communities and nation-building’. The cohesion of religious identit-
ies—which predate religious-nationalist identities—is achieved through
ritual communication, pilgrimage and migration. Religious identities are trans-
formed into religious-nationalist ones, through the development of supra-

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local identities, connected to the formation of states and ‘other powerful

centralising institutions’, and of ‘networks of economic interdependence’,
some of them of ‘precolonial’ origin. Secondly, Western discourse offers an
‘ideological blueprint of an imagined social order deriving from the West’;
but the blueprint is contested, not dominant.
These two trends are overlaid by what he calls the ‘colonial-orientalist
impact’. The colonial state and its institutions reinforced divisions between
the communities and established the ‘Hindu majority’ and the ‘Muslim
minority’ as social and political categories. As a parallel, though inseparable,
force, orientalism shaped the way Indians perceived themselves, mainly
through its construction of India’s past. Orientalist discourse was carried into
religious nationalism via religious reform movements such as the Arya Samaj (pp.
11–22). At the same time Van der Veer denies that there is a necessary
contradiction between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ forms of religion; nor does he
accept the contention that orientalism achieved ‘hegemonic force’.1 The
‘colonial-orientalist impact’ notwithstanding, religious nationalism, and as a
consequence contemporary Indian politics, remains ‘to a significant degree
‘indigenous’.’ Both Hindu and Muslim reforms ‘continue discourses that
have a precolonial tradition’ (pp. 20, 58).
The author thus makes two main equations:
(1) ‘Bourgeois’ religious reform = ‘precolonial’ religious discourse + ‘orientalist’
transformation of (a) that discourse and (b) the political context.
(2) ‘Religious nationalism’ = the ‘political discourse’ created by ‘bourgeois’
religious reform in defence of ‘our threatened religion’ + a (pre-existing)
conception of ‘religious community’ shared across class barriers, through ‘ritual
communication’, migration, pilgrimage.
The main weakness of the text is its somewhat arbitrary selectivity. Van
der Veer emphasizes that there are ‘several contested versions’ along which
traditions are invented and nations imagined. And ‘the cultural material
used for invention and imagination is historically produced and thus has to
be understood historically’ (pp. 196–7). This argument is not carried to its
logical conclusions. For instance: a journey to a sacred centre is ‘a ritual
construction of the self that not only integrates the believers but also places
a symbolic boundary between themselves and ‘‘outsiders’’.’ This boundary,
however, is contested and negotiated, revised and reinterpreted (p. 11). But
if boundaries and definitions are indeed contested, are they not also contested
outside the domain of religious discourse? Curiously, the author omits the
question of the separation of Bangladesh from post-independence Pakis-
tan—the formation of a new nation-state on linguistic lines from within a
‘religious-nationalist’ one—from his consideration.
Since it is by the tenets of modernity that ‘religious nationalism’ is
regarded as ‘somehow flawed and hybrid’, the author attempts the delegit-
imization of ‘secular’ nationalism through a by now conventional assault

1
‘[Edward] Said’s notion that colonialism and orientalism created the reality in
which Indians had to live . . . is in itself an orientalist fallacy that denies Indians
agency in constructing their societies and simplifies the intricate interplay of West-
ern and Indian discourses.’ (p. 21).

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on post-Enlightenment notions of ‘modernity’. Secularism’s continuance is
attributed to the secular institutional framework and ideology of the colo-
nial state having been inherited by the postcolonial state and a significant
section of the Indian elite who controlled it (pp. 11–17). This is the same
colonialism, presumably, which, he earlier asserts, reinforced differences
between the categories ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’; one might be permitted to
ask here whether there was more than one colonialism. The argument is
also dependent on strong generalizations around the term ‘precolonial’,
with the implicit assumption that the postcolonial mind can simply jettison
the intellectual baggage of postcolonial thought in trying to understand the
‘precolonial’.
Is there then no ‘indigenous’ idiom of modernity; only a ‘precolonial tradition’
of ‘discourse’, transformed and placed in a new political context? (p. 21). ‘Funda-
mentalism’, in van der Veer’s opinion, as represented by such movements
as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad—is not ‘antimodernist’ if it has a nationalist
agenda. The VHP is therefore ‘fundamentally modernist’ (pp. 132–3). This
seems to be the kind of ‘modernity’ which the author is willing to attribute
to South Asia—and in the last analysis he has not been able altogether to
dispense with the concept. In his version of India’s past, then, it is ‘precolo-
nial tradition’ that comes home to roost—albeit transformed and recontex-
tualized—as ‘religious nationalism’.
University of Cambridge BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH

Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia.

By STANLEY J. TAMBIAH. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1996. Pp.
x, 395.

Stanley J. Tambiah has previously published two short books on the ethnic
conflict in Sri Lanka. He described his first book, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide
and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago, 1986), as an ‘engaged political
tract’ rather than a ‘distanced academic treatise’ written by a Sri Lankan
drawing on ‘lived experience’ as well as scholarly research. Leveling Crowds
is more of an academic treatise than the other two books, but it is also a
work of moral and political engagement in which the author is not afraid
to pass judgement. Moreover, in writing comparatively about ethnic viol-
ence across South Asia, Tambiah does not lose sight of his Sri Lankan point
of departure, so that one of this book’s strengths is its combination of aca-
demic detachment and personal, informed engagement.
Although Leveling Crowds is not the first book to consider ethnic violence
in the region comparatively, it is certainly the best monograph on the sub-
ject by a single author. Empirically, it is based on a series of case-studies
from Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan: in particular, the 1915 riots between
Sinhala Buddhists and Muslims in colonial Ceylon, ethnic riots in post-
independence Sri Lanka, the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in 1984, the ethnic
conflict in Sind in Pakistan, and the rioting which followed the demolition
of the Ayodhya mosque in north India in 1992. For each of these cases, the

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quantity and quality of source material are variable, and particularly on the
Ayodhya dispute and the wider context of Hindu nationalism the already
large literature is growing rapidly. Inevitably, therefore, as Tambiah
admits, his discussion is selective and sometimes incomplete or already out-
of-date. Yet much more has been gained than lost by Tambiah’s commit-
ment to comparative description and analysis, and this book, as well as
being important for specialists, will be invaluable for teachers and students
of courses on contemporary ethnic conflict.
The book is primarily a study of collective, ethnic violence by ‘civilian’
crowds, and not of refugees or victims of violence. Its title, which borrows
the idea of ‘levelling’ from Le Bon’s and Canetti’s studies in ‘crowd psycho-
logy’, encapsulates one of Tambiah’s central ideas: that rioting ethnic
crowds are mainly motivated by a collective desire to wipe out unfair
advantages allegedly enjoyed by an enemy group, typically an ethnic minor-
ity, so that social inequalities are levelled—usually by killing people and
razing buildings. Because riots are normally short-lived occurrences, how-
ever, the victims can often recover their former position and thereby
become targets for further levelling actions, so that sporadic rioting can
develop into a more permanent and chronic state of conflict giving rise to
successive eruptions of collective violence.
Tambiah’s analysis of ‘levelling’ partly derives from his critical re-
examination of early studies in crowd psychology, but he also makes com-
parisons between modern ethnic rioters and the crowds of pre-industrial
Europe, whose historians have examined their ‘moral economy’. These
scholars have in turn inspired some historians of colonial South Asia, not-
ably members of the Indian ‘Subaltern Studies’ school. In the end, however,
Tambiah concludes that the two types of rioting crowds are fundamentally
different. Food-rioters in eighteenth-century England, for example, derived
their moral justification from a sense of fairness that was in fact widely
shared in society as a whole, whereas modern ethnic rioters justify their
actions in terms of their exclusive claims to valuable resources, which can
never be acceptable to their opponents and all other sections within a plur-
alist society.
Many of Tambiah’s conclusions about levelling crowds are convincing and
well-supported by the evidence from his case-studies. These conclusions
could have been advanced with more clarity and less repetition, however, if
Tambiah had deleted from his text a lot of the ‘workings’ he needed to
reach them. Sometimes these workings—such as the use of inappropriate
analogies from physics—are just obfuscatory, and sometimes—as when
Durkheim on collective ritual is summarized—they are unnecessary. The
book, in other words, is quite a bit longer than it should have been.
To characterize the processual movement of collective ethnic violence,
Tambiah employs three paired concepts. ‘Focalization’ and ‘transvaluation’
refer to the processes by which local incidents are respectively denuded of
their particularities and then assimilated to a wider framework of ethnic
division; the 1985 riots between Biharis and Pathans in Karachi were one
example of these two processes. Opposite in sequence are ‘nationalization’
and ‘parochialization’ whereby a local dispute is portrayed as a national

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 REVIEWS 255
issue and is then replicated in relation to local factors in numerous different
places; the Ayodhya dispute and its aftermath in Hindu–Muslim riots are
an example of these two processes. In trying to make sense of the pattern
of collective violence, Tambiah also coins ‘routinization’ and ‘ritualization’,
which refer to the stereotypical strategies and acts that constitute collective
events such as riots, but also elections and religious festivals. The frequent
connection between ethnic violence and religious manifestations is a famil-
iar one, but Tambiah rightly emphasizes too the close link between violence
and elections in modern South Asia, where ethnic ‘communalism’ so often
shapes the course of mass democratic politics.
Whether Tambiah’s three paired concepts are really analytical concepts
as opposed to wordy descriptive labels is questionable. Moreover, despite
his concern with these processes, he overlooks a crucial point that is also
germane to his discussion of the moral economy of levelling crowds. Accord-
ing to Tambiah, ‘after bouts of violence, the participants seemingly return
to their normal daily lives and continue to live side by side with their erst-
while enemies’, and the perpetrators of violence seem to suffer no collective
malaise (p. 230). Later, discussing the psychology of collective violence, he
says that ‘rioters, after a spate of orgasmic violence, retrospectively recol-
lect and speak of their actions in a distanced and neutral tone’, whereas
victims react very differently and have to ‘remember and tell and retell the
story of the violence and their experience of victimization and suffering’
(pp. 293–4). Aggressors forget, it seems, but victims remember.
Relevant evidence on these matters is admittedly scarce and some of it
is so recent that it would not have been available to Tambiah. Nonetheless,
this evidence does cast serious doubt on his observations. The aggressors’
‘normal daily lives’ after violence are not normal in the same way as they
were before, as could have been deduced from the fact that they and their
changed victims may still live side by side and are, as Tambiah notes, ‘fre-
quently not strangers to one another’ (p. 276). Furthermore, the processes
of focalization and transvaluation, and nationalization and parochialization,
must ensure that how ‘normality’ in social relations is constituted and
understood will be significantly altered by collective violence; a mundane
quarrel between neighbours, for example, can come to be perceived as
another episode in a global ethnic confrontation which now defines ‘normal-
ity’. A chilling illustration comes from Sudhir Kakar’s study of violent
‘strong men’ in Hyderabad, one of whom has ‘a ‘‘healthy’’ attitude toward
the mutual slaughter’ of Hindus and Muslims; in his words: ‘Riots are like
one-day cricket matches where the killings are the runs. You have to score
at least one more than the opposing team. The whole honour of your nation
(qaum) depends on not scoring less than the opponent’ (S. Kakar, The Col-
ours of Violence, Delhi, 1995, p. 72). This man’s view may indeed be extreme,
but it captures something crucial about how, for perpetrators of violence,
‘transvaluation’ has reconstituted ethnic killing as akin to the ordinary pas-
time of cricket.
It is also important that the perpetrators of violence and its male victims
may be the same people, or that the latter are men who failed to act viol-
ently to save their own families. Tambiah, while recognizing that aggressors

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 256 REVIEWS

and victims are often closely linked, draws too sharp a line between them.
Veena Das’s work on the Sikh victims of the Delhi riots shows that among
men (but not women) guilt about their failure to take violent revenge was
widespread (‘Our work to cry; your work to listen’, in V. Das, ed., Mirrors of
Violence, Delhi, 1990, pp. 384–8). She also reports a particularly gruesome
incident in which she saw drunken Sikhs, whose kin had been butchered,
re-enacting the slaughter with themselves in the role of perpetrators (‘The
spatialization of violence: case study of a ‘‘communal riot’’ ’, in K. Basu and
S. Subrahmanyam, eds, Unravelling the Nation, Delhi, 1996, p. 198).
These examples cited from Kakar and Das clearly show that collective
ethnic violence changes both aggressors and victims, who are not necessar-
ily clearly distinguishable from each other, and that it also changes the
nature of ‘normal’ social relationships among them. Moreover, these
changes may involve the emergence of a shared ‘moral economy’—however
immoral it may actually look to most of us—in which men on both sides,
and maybe women too, agree that levelling, or more precisely marginal
superiority, should be pursued in the likeness of one-day cricket matches.
Aggressors and victims share far more in common than Tambiah allows,
and like other writers on the subject, his natural sympathy with the victims
tends to vitiate his understanding of the values which increasingly inform
the actions and reactions of people on both sides in ethnic confrontations
in modern South Asia. Notwithstanding these criticisms, however, Leveling
Crowds is a serious and important contribution to the study of ethnic conflict
and collective violence which ought to be widely read.
London School of Economics and Political Science C. J. FULLER

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