Deepak Mehta - Living With Violence

The histriography of the riot assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict, integrated into the concept of communalism, is independent of the participants in violence. Once formulated through 'records', this concept shows that the riot is its practice. In doing so, histriography conceives of violence in purely instrumental terms, as much as it negotiates the capacity of violence to alter the world of those who come into contact with it. All instances of violence designated as 'communal' are marked by a textual coherence and are traced to one originary source.

(From, Writing The Riot: Between the histriography and ethnography of communal violence in India.)