Communal violence in India, especially between Hindus and Muslims, has long been the center of scholarly research. Since the 1990s, historians and anthropologists have innovatively analyzed colonial and partition-related riots to understand why and how they happened and the contextual development of communal identities. Political scientists have put forth thought-provoking paradigms of urban communal rioting in the wake of the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992 and 2002. All, it would seem, owe an intellectual debt to sociologist Richard Lambert's much-cited dissertation of 1951, now published six decades later. That the publication is mostly an unchanged version of the dissertation (including the title), and that Lambert was an eyewitness, of sorts, to the partition riots of 1946–47, makes Hindu-Muslim Riots a primary source.
Lambert's main aim in the book is to provide us with historical patterns of violence, within both urban and rural contexts. He devotes five of the book's seven chapters...
