The papers in this special issue of Domains deal with the category of the communal riot in India, specifically the anti-Sikh riot of 1984 in Delhi, the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai and the Hindu-Muslim riots of Gujarat in 2002. The literature, both academic and in the print and visual media, on each of these riots is vast, but as yet we do not find a sustained effort to put together these events of violence, much less reflect on their common modalities. The papers in this issue mark an ethnographic attempt to come to terms with what in India (and perhaps the Subcontinent, at large) has been a ubiquitous phenomenon since at least the mid-1980s - a pervasive repetition and visibility of intra-religious warfare. The papers show that the communal riot is both a practice and a discursive condition, anchored in documentary, pictorial, ethnographic, narrative, and judicial accounts. In the process the papers shed light on different dimensions of the riot, while also revealing regularities and diversity in its discursive formation. Domains is the Journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo.