Liminal Lives: Violence, Peace, and Urban Belonging in Calcutta, 1946–1992

Abstract

This article examines communal violence in Calcutta between 1946 and 1992 through the analytical lens of liminality to explore how moments of crisis reshaped urban belonging, identity, and spatial relations. Rather than treating riots as episodic breakdowns of order, it conceptualizes them as threshold moments that suspended everyday norms and produced unstable configurations of community, territory, and citizenship. Beginning with the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 and continuing through the disturbances of 1950 and 1964 to the violence of 1992, the study traces continuities in the forms, actors, and meanings of urban conflict. Drawing on archival reports, press accounts, and secondary scholarship, the article argues that communal violence was embedded in the city's social geography – its neighbourhoods, refugee flows, and labour patterns. Riots transformed familiar spaces such as neighbourhoods and religious sites into liminal zones where protection and threat coexisted. These episodes reveal the ambivalent roles of state agencies and local strongmen, alongside moments of inter-communal solidarity that complicate narratives of inevitable antagonism. By foregrounding experiential and spatial dimensions, the article demonstrates how recurring crises produced a fragile but persistent urban coexistence, where belonging is negotiated in the in-between spaces of memory and interaction.