From Violence to Hope: The relationship between media, information, memory and identity in the Hindu-Muslim conflict in contemporary India

This work will describe how media, information, memory and identity shape the narratives of violence. With the expression ‘narrative of violence’, I identify all the instances of language, mediated by every media, which, after a time of sedimentation and repetition, generates division, hate, conflict and ultimately violence among people. This will show how the media, through the spreading of information, are influencing our memories and, thus, our individual and group identities in a way that generates conflict and ultimately violence among those groups. After analysing in detail the functioning of each of these four parts, the framework will be applied to the context of the violence between Hindus and Muslims in contemporary India. This study will be aimed at understanding that the ways in which the narratives of violence are generated and spread are common among those groups and, more than this, are common between different epochs. Finally, this work will try to provide a way, which will act on our four-folded framework, to limit the diffusion of hate and, thus, the bloodshed among communities.