Communities / Photo Essay

The Grammar of Hatred

A family’s history in response to a call for violence

A family photograph from a trip to Rajamahal, in presentday Jharkhand. My grandmother stands to the left, my youngest aunt is in the frock, and another aunt is visible behind her. My uncle is the one with the long hair and spectacles. The photograph was taken around the time of his engagement. When I first saw this picture as a child, I thought this was the Babri Masjid, of which I had heard much before I understood its significance. Its name was everywhere. I later learned that this was actually the Akbari Masjid, built by the Mughal emperor Akbar.
A family photograph from a trip to Rajamahal, in presentday Jharkhand. My grandmother stands to the left, my youngest aunt is in the frock, and another aunt is visible behind her. My uncle is the one with the long hair and spectacles. The photograph was taken around the time of his engagement. When I first saw this picture as a child, I thought this was the Babri Masjid, of which I had heard much before I understood its significance. Its name was everywhere. I later learned that this was actually the Akbari Masjid, built by the Mughal emperor Akbar.
Zeeshan Hasan Akhtar
01 April, 2026

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Violence broke out in Bhagalpur on 24 October 1989 after months of sustained communal mobilisation, including processions linked to the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. A fact-finding report by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights documented the systematic targeting of Muslim localities, the role of rumour in inciting violence and the complicity or active participation of the police in enabling large-scale killings of Muslims. One of the most brutal instances of mass violence against Muslims in independent India occurred during these riots: the Logain massacre. At least a hundred Muslims were killed in the village of Logain, situated on the edges of Bhagalpur district, in Bihar. Their bodies—mutilated and hacked—were dumped into a pit, over which cauliflowers were planted to conceal the mass grave.

Decades later, the Logain massacre has found an afterlife in the digital realm, where anonymous right-wing social-media handles, as well as politicians, increasingly use the incident as a threat to Muslims in this country. On the surface, these phrases themselves retain some banality—“cauliflower farming is needed in every corner of this country,” “mass cauliflower farming required,” “only cauliflower farming can fix this issue”—yet their repetition across platforms, often in response to news events or moments of heightened communal tension, produces a shared vocabulary through which the desire to exterminate a community is articulated without being explicitly named.

My two eldest aunts, photographed in the 1970s in Barauni, where my grandfather worked at the Indian Oil refinery. My aunts and cousins have facial features resembling various peoples of Eastern Asia, representing the mixed races and ethnicities that formed our family.
The view from our terrace, in the early 1980s. Visible is Mirza Talab, across which lies Mirjanhat—an almost exclusively Hindu neighbourhood. It no longer looks like this. The pond has now dried up, and palm fronds have given way to unplanned colonies. The Hindu residents of Mirjanhat and Katghar blocked the drain from our colony, where butchers live and work, because they believe the water pollutes their neighbourhood. As a result, our drains are choked and overflowing, and women have to regularly scoop sewage out of their homes.

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