Bibliographical Essay

For religion and violence in South Asia in general, a starting point might be the classic study of riots in South Asia, Stanley Tambiah's Leveling Crowds: Ethno-Nationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which compares Muslim riots in Pakistan, Hindu riots in India and Buddhist riots in Sri Lanka.

Studies of violence in Sikhism are mostly related to the Khalistan movement in the 1980s, including the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The most revealing study, based on insider interviews, is Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). See also interviews with Khalistan supporters in MarkJuergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

Works on Muslim violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan are largely concerned with the rise of the Taliban and other jihadi groups in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The best book on the Afghan Taliban is Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); see also Peter Marsden, The Taliban: War, Religion, and the New World Order in Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The role of religion in the violent rhetoric of the Pakistan Taliban is explored in Mona Kanwal Sheikh, Guardians of God: Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Regarding communal violence in the partition of South Asia that created the independent states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, see the biography of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, by Stanley Wolpert, and a contrasting view by Ayesha Jalal, and the more recent analysis of the partition by Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

For violence in the Theravada Buddhist countries of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, see the previously mentioned book by Stanley Tambiah, Leveling Crowds, as well as his Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The Buddhist-Muslim communal violence in Myanmar is covered in Matthew Walton and Susan Hayward, Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar (Honolulu: East West Center, 2014). For Buddhist violence in general, including the South Asian cases, see the essays in Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.), Buddhist Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).