Ethnographic profiles of lesser known Muslim communities in various parts of India.

Ethnographic profiles of lesser known Muslim communities in various parts of India.

With more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms - not to say anything about the communal waves of violence that have affected them over the last 25 years. In India's cities, these developments find contrasted expressions. While Muslims are everywhere lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow). These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping. This book supplements an ethnographic approach of Muslims in 11 Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first hand account of an untold story.

This volume approaches the study of Muslim societies through an evolutionary lens, challenging Islamic traditions, identities, communities, beliefs, practices and ideologies as static, frozen or unchangeable. It assumes that there is neither a monolithic, essential or authentic Islam, nor a homogeneous Muslim community. Similarly, there are no fixed binary oppositions such as between the ulama and sufi saints or textual and lived Islam. The overarching perspective — that there is no fixity in the meanings of Islamic symbols and that the language of Islam can be used by individuals, organizations, movements and political parties variously in religious and non-religious contexts — underlies the ethnographically rich essays that comprise this volume. Divided in three parts, the volume cumulatively presents an initial framework for the study of Muslim communities in India embedded in different regional and local contexts. The first part focuses on ethnographies of three Muslim communities (Kuchchhi Jatt, Irani Shia and Sidis) and their relationships with others, with shifting borders and frontiers; part two examines the issue of ‘caste’ of certain Muslim communities; and the third part, containing chapters on Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Mumbai and Gujarat, looks at the varied responses of Muslims as Indian citizens in regional contexts at different historical moments. Although the volume focuses on Muslim communities in India, it is also meant to bridge an important gap in, and contribute to, the ‘sociology of India’ which has been organized and taught primarily as a sociology of Hindu society. The book will appeal to those in sociology, history, political science, education, modern South Asian Studies, and to the general reader interested in India & South Asia.

Selected articles presented at a seminar on the social structure of Indian Muslims held at the Hamdard Convention Centre, New Delhi, 22-23 Oct. 1989, sponsored by the Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi, India.

In this book Mushirul Hasan articulates a vision of Islam or rather the many different kinds of Islam, instead of the frightening monolith of popular perception, living in harmony with other faiths, and of Indian Muslims, inheritors of the great Indian civilization, living in a plural society. Engaging with the debates surrounding the society, polity, and history of India's Muslims, and using historical and literary sources, as well as the writings of modern Muslim thinkers like Aziz Ahmad and Mohammad Mujeeb, Hasan traces the development of contemporary ideas about Muslims from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, through British rule and the partition, to the present day. For Hasan, a truly secular reading of Indian history reveals Indian Islam as one that exists in a pluralist milieu.

Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. However, the book also illustrates how liberalisation, intensifying forms of marginalisation and incorporation into global production networks have led to spatial pressures, fragmentation of artisanal labour, and forms of enclavement that persist despite geographical mobility and connectedness. By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.