A Small Retelling Gujarat 2002 has been one of the most litigated, mediatized, and politically polarizing events of mass atrocity in contemporary India. The version of the events of the pogrom and the narrative that I hold on to through this chapter is aimed at foregrounding the ‘small voices’, to borrow historian Ranajit Guha’s expression (1996: 1–12), that struggle to keep alive a certain memory of the pogrom in an India where they are constantly being ‘drowned in the noise of statist [and increasingly corporatist] commands’ (1996: 3), that propagate a dominant memory. It has been over a decade since the western Indian state of Gujarat experienced one of independent India’s most violent mass atrocities against its Muslim minority population. Postcolonial India has experienced many incidents of anti-minority mass religious violence since the Partition in 1947: notably, the ongoing persecution of Muslims by the occupying Indian army in Kashmir, the…

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