This article is about the question of state power, violence and the identity predicaments of a marginalised Muslim community called Marakkayars, living in Beemapalli, a coastal hamlet located in the Thiruvananthapuram district of southern Kerala. Based on insights from judicial discourse and ethnography of an event of spectacle state violence that occurred in Beemapalli in the year 2009, the article shows how the contesting discourses that emerged after the violence are entangled with a larger transformation that has taken place in the recent history of this locality—the shift from an ethnic enclave to a ghetto. The judicial discourse which justifies the police violence in Beemapalli and the counter narratives from the locality that vehemently oppose it give interesting insight into the confrontations between the state and a ghettoised community prior to and after the violence. The article also demonstrates how the relationship between the state agencies and ghettoised Marakkayar Muslims is saturated with varied forms of violence: legitimate and illegitimate, physical and symbolic, spectacle and everyday in a complex way.