Abstract
Through a reading of over 100 police First Information Reports (FIR) of the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, I suggest a compositional approach to legal archives of violence that goes beyond the binaries of absence/presence and success/failure in the court of law. Such an approach focuses on forms—repetition, aggregation and trace—that lie on the surface of police documents. Focusing on what is aggregated, repeated and even left blank, this article describes how archives comprise the infrastructure of anti-minority violence in India. I describe how police archives attach themselves to colonial categories of the riot, transform public attacks against Muslims into spontaneous outbursts of ‘Hindu anger’ and produce a space-time when collective violence against minorities becomes natural destruction: anonymous violence without agency or legal culpability.