Archives as the Infrastructure of Anti-Muslim Violence in India

Through a reading of over 100 police First Information Reports (FIR) of the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, I suggest a compositional approach to legal archives of violence that goes beyond the binaries of absence/presence and success/failure in the court of law. Such an approach focuses on forms-repetition, aggregation and trace-that lie on the surface of police documents. Focusing on what is aggregated, repeated and even left blank, this article describes how archives comprise the infrastructure of anti-minority violence in India. I describe how police archives attach themselves to colonial categories of the riot, transform public attacks against Muslims into spontaneous outbursts of 'Hindu anger' and produce a space-time when collective violence against minorities becomes natural destruction: anonymous violence without agency or legal culpability.