Ajay Verghese's The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India is a simple book with a simplistic premise. That premise, repeated often throughout the book, is that ethnic violence in contemporary India is driven by historical factors from the colonial period. “In the provinces, the British favored high castes, protected religious minorities through a policy of neutrality, and discriminated against low castes and adivasis. In the princely states, native kings did the opposite: their policies favored their co-religionists, protected the low castes and tribals, and discriminated against non-coreligionists.… Today, former British provinces like Ajmer and Malabar experience primarily caste and tribal violence whereas former princely states such as Jaipur and Travancore suffer considerable religious violence” (p. 149). Academics working on South Asia (and local residents) would be surprised to know that there is religious violence in Travancore and caste violence in Malabar. I for one am rather taken aback, since...
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