Dr Rositta Valiyamattam: The Missing and The Misunderstood. Documenting & Critiquing Female Agency & its Representations during the 1992-93 Communal Riots in Western India.
This project focuses on documenting the unrecorded history and critiquing existing historical representations of the agency of women in western India especially Mumbai and neighbouring areas which were hotbeds of violence during the 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots following the demolition of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.
The agency of these women, who, despite their subalternity, form the core of Indian social life, needs to be recovered, through an interdisciplinary interface of history, sociology, politics and literature, through direct engagement with them on the ground as well as through a critiquing of textual as well as audio-visual sources. This is expected to help in offering a more genuine alternative to mainstream history and thereby new insights into potentially more effective paradigms for dealing with communal violence and maintaining peace and harmony.