New from Cambridge University Press: Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947 by Anwesha Roy.About the book, from the publisher:
The decade of the 1940s was a turbulent one for Bengal. War, famine, riots and partition - Bengal witnessed it all, and the unique experience of each of these factors created a space for diverse social and political forces to thrive and impact the lives of people of the province. The book embarks on a study of the last seven years of colonial rule in Bengal, analysing the interplay of multiple socioeconomic and political factors that shaped community identities into communal ones. The focus is on three major communal riots that the province witnessed - the Dacca Riots (1941), the Great Calcutta Killings (August 1946) and the Noakhali Riots (October 1946). This book moves beyond the binary understanding of communalism as Hindu versus Muslim and looks at the caste politics in the province, and offers a complete understanding of the 1940s before partition.Anwesha Roy is Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Gandhian Politics at the Department of History, King's College London. She completed her Ph.D. from Jawaharlal National University, India, and was also a Charles Wallace Scholar to Britain in 2014.
--Marshal Zeringue
