The year 1937 saw the establishment of Congress Ministries in eight of the eleven provinces in which the provincial elections had been held, Bihar being one of them. The resounding victory of the Congress which secured a clear majority in the province of Bihar and the dismal performance of the Muslim League seemed at the time to depict the mood of the people in general. It was taken as a clear rejection of the politics of communalism and separatism and as an expression of faith in the secular credentials of the Indian National Congress. However, less than a decade later, the province was gripped by severe communal tensions and had become one of the most prominent parts of India from where the movement for Pakistan drew support. This article thus explores the nature of the communal violence that occurred in Bihar in 1946 against the backdrop of the ‘escalating’ communal tensions during the late 1930s and early 1940s. It seeks to problematise the dichotomy that exists in literature on communal violence between moments of what have been called ‘extraordinary’ violence (such as riots) and the everyday structures of (what Gyanendra Pandey has called) ‘routine violence’. Through its analysis of contemporary material produced by the Muslim League, the Congress Ministry and the provincial British administration to explain the causes of the 1946 riots in Bihar, it argues that it is in the moments of rupture presented by riots that everyday structures of violence are trivialised or normalised through processes of ‘dichotomisation’, ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘denial’.

中文翻译：

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在“日常”和“非凡”之间：1946 年比哈尔邦的分区、暴力和社区骚乱

1937 年，在举行省级选举的 11 个省中的 8 个省设立了国会部委，比哈尔邦就是其中之一。代表大会在比哈尔省获得明显多数席位的巨大胜利和穆斯林联盟的惨淡表现在当时似乎描绘了一般人民的情绪。这被视为对社区主义和分离主义政治的明确拒绝，并表达了对印度国民大会世俗资格的信仰。然而，不到十年后，该省陷入严重的社区紧张局势，并已成为印度最突出的地区之一，支持巴基斯坦的运动从那里获得支持。因此，本文探讨了 1946 年在 1930 年代末和 1940 年代初期社区紧张局势“升级”的背景下发生在比哈尔邦的社区暴力的性质。它试图解决文献中存在的关于社区暴力的二分法，即所谓的“非同寻常”暴力（如骚乱）和（贾南德拉·潘迪（Gyanendra Pandey）所说的）“常规暴力”的日常结构之间的二分法。通过对穆斯林联盟、国会部和英国省政府制作的当代材料的分析，以解释 1946 年比哈尔邦骚乱的原因，它认为，正是在骚乱带来的破裂时刻，日常的暴力结构通过“二分法”、“非人性化”和“否认”的过程而被轻视或规范化。