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Making Sense of Ruptures: Facets of Normalized Violence in India

Published in January - June 2026 (Vol. 1, Issue 1, 2026)

Making Sense of Ruptures: Facets of Normalized Violence in India - Issue cover

Abstract

The attempt of this essay will be to understand ways in which violence is normalized in India. The assumption this essay makes is that violence is perceived to be a point of rupture in the everyday functioning of a society. Despite the abnormalcy, violence emerges as a ritualized and repetitive phenomenon of political lives. There is very little explanation available for why individual perpetrators engage in violence, with the burden often falling upon the faceless mob. In trying to understand different approaches to studying violence, the essay attempts to extend the framework to current times of the internet and social media, where rumor generation and narrative concoction find an all-embracing presence. The essay reflects upon Shubh Mathur’s ethnographic accounts of Hindu nationalism in Rajasthan in the early 1990s through the frameworks of the Institutional Riots System and the role of crowd psychology in mob violence. It draws on the work of Arani Basu to understand the relation between media and violence as it stands today. The essay intends to put across a case for a framework of assessment, beyond the ecological and sequential models, consisting of media technologies, everyday social life, and the political structure to explain the basis of violence that maps out the agency of violence to an individual and not just a mob.

Authors (1)

Rusha Chatterjee
ORCID

Centre for Studies of Plural S...

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Article Information

Article ID:
PCS110012
Paper ID:
PCS-01-000012
Pages:
149-158
Published Date:
2026-05-09
JATS XML:
JATS XML

How to Cite

Chatterjee, R. (2026). Making Sense of Ruptures: Facets of Normalized Violence in India. Politics, Culture and Society, 1(1), 149-158. https://doi.org/10.68243/jpcs.2026.v1.i1.000012

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