The Once And Future Riot – Joe Sacco

Description

In 2013, Muzzafarnagar in western Uttar Pradesh was torn apart by communal riots. In this book of graphic reportage, Joe Sacco explores the mechanics, dynamics, mythologies, uses and abuses of violence for political gain.

Compared to other episodes of communal violence, the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013 were a relatively small-scale affair – some scores of people were killed and several tens of thousands displaced. It had happened before and may well happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed and riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turning on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both before the rampage and in its bloody aftermath.

In The Once and Future Riot, Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand these riots as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds to shape the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the ways in which perpetrators justify their participation in bloodshed.

From the Great War to Gaza, Joe Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us. Here, he turns his masterful visual reportage to an event that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for precarious multi-ethnic societies everywhere