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The Salem Riots, 1882. Judiciary versus Executive in the Mediation of a Communal Dispute*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Extract
Studies on the origins of Hindu–Muslim riots in nineteenth-century India have rightly stressed the distinction between what Professor Norman Brown calls ‘the precipitating causes’ of conflict and the deepseated religio-cultural differences that have long kept these two communities apart. As Norman Brown says, the precipitating cause ‘might be a quarrel over ownership of a parcel of land and the right to erect a religious building on it, or the playing of music by a Hindu wedding procession as it passed a mosque where such a noise constituted sacrilege, or exaction of exorbitant rent or interest by a landlord or moneylender of one religious persuasion from a tenant or debtor of the other, or sacrifice of a cow by Muslims, or the clash of crowds when a Hindu and a Muslim festival coincided’.
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References
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31 Macleane's diagnosis of the cause of the riots, as indeed his overall handling of the situation, was accepted in its entirety by his superiors in Madras. Governor M. E. Grant Duff in a demi-official letter to the Viceroy asserted that the riots of 16 August were ‘the result of a deeply-laid conspiracy in which many of our Hindu officials have been implicated’. The Madras authorities, convinced that the ‘rising spirit of religious intolerance and lawlessness’ in South India could only be checked by punishing the offenders ‘with the utmost rigour of the law’, demanded from the courts maximum sentences for those guilty of violence, dismissed peremptorily officials suspected of complicity or withholding information about the disturbance, and imposed a heavy levy on those villages which had participated in the riots to maintain a punitive police force in the district. The scale and severity of the punishment brought protests from certain sections of public opinion and subsequently, when some of the prosecution witnesses were convicted of giving false evidence, a concerted agitation was unleashed in Madras which ultimately led to the release of all prisoners in October 1884. These developments, which had important political implications for South India as a whole, are discussed in the author's unpublished dissertation, Politics and Change in the Madras Presidency, 1884–1894. A regional study of Indian Nationalism, University of London, 1966, Chapter III.Google Scholar