The Centre’s scholarship has effectively reviewed the theoretical and historical landscape relating to secularism, pluralism, ethnic violence and genocide. Faculty writing has argued that established modes of describing social reality obscure complex dimensions of social and cultural practice, the porosity of cultures of belief and faith, and the complex ways in which communities and languages are entangled with one another. It has sought to understand cosmopolitanism outside the west, how traditional structures were refashioned in the face of colonialism, and the normative contribution, as well as the limits, of Indian secularism. The project on Reconstructing Lives is the most comprehensive study of the Partition of the subcontinent to date, based on immersive interviews with a very large number of survivors conducted over a long period of time. CSDS faculty has also investigated caste, class, ideological and gender violence.