Contrary to the often-held notion of inter-religious peace as a natural or passive process characterized by the mere absence of communal strife, this dissertation seeks to understand and explore peaceful modes of religious coexistence as an active and dynamic process through an ethnographic study of the multi-religious town of Kodungallur in central Kerala. This understanding of peace as an active process rests on two premises. Firstly, peace and violence are not treated as dichotomous ends but rather intricately intertwined possibilities of the same social processes. Secondly, it contends that peace is primarily political, as power plays a constitutive role in the social relations that perpetuate communal peace, much like violence. Through a critical examination of the existing literature on inter-religious relations, encompassing both violence and peace, the thesis proposes a political mobilizational approach to understand the dynamics of religious coexistence. Anchored around the concept of political articulation, this mobilizational approach simultaneously emphasizes the centrality of associational life while accounting for the role of political mobilizations in shaping the dynamics of inter-communal coexistence. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Kodungallur for thirteen months between 2020 and 2022, consisting primarily of source materials such as interviews, written materials, and observations, the thesis further introduces the concept of the “political infrastructure of peace.” This concept encompasses a network of public and shared social spaces, inter-religious associationalism, and the articulation of a secular and non-communal public identity made possible by the emergence and institutionalization of communitarian and class-based forms of mobilization in Kodungallur since the 1920s. The thesis argues that such an approach enables us to understand how associational political mobilizations construct and normalize identities, public spaces, and claims of belongingness that constitute the dynamics of inter-communal coexistence.



Keywords: Communal harmony, Political Mobilization, Peace, Civil society, Kodungallur