The Color of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict.

• Author: McLean, Malcolm
• Position: Review

By SUDHIR KAKAR. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1996. Pp. 231. $42, [pounds]33.50 (cloth); $14.95, [pounds]11.95 (paper).

Anyone aware of what goes on in the world today must surely ask: "What makes people savagely attack members of neighboring communities? Why do people persist in behavior which they know will provoke violence on the part of their neighbors? And why are these acts so often committed in the name of religion?" These are the sorts of questions the author of this book sets out to address. Kakar is a writer whose work seldom fails to stimulate, and this book is no exception. It provides a useful, convincing, and thought-provoking study of inter-communal violence in India, especially the Hindu-Muslim riots in Hyderabad in 1990, which at the same time sheds light on similar violence elsewhere in the world.

In seeking to understand such situations Kakar avoids easy answers. The perpetrators are not psychopaths, they are not sexually insecure, they did not suffer abuse as children. Nor are such conflicts to be explained as some do as being "really" due to secular causes deriving from colonialism. On the other hand, Kakar does acknowledge that religion is only one among many causes, and he sets out to examine the relative strengths of these causes.

He proceeds by visiting Hyderabad and talking to people involved on both sides of the 1990 riot. His study is based on extensive interviews with both perpetrators ("Warriors") and victims from both communities, and psychological tests such as the Giessen Test, the Morality Interview, and the Toy Construction method for children. Here Kakar shows great sympathy and understanding for his respondents, together with a critical assessment of their motives and explanations.

The thesis which emerges is that what lies behind such outbreaks of violence is the difficult process by which people struggle to form individual and communal identities in a modern and modernizing world. This process involves historical, political, socio-economic factors, besides...