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.

After 1947, Muslims of India, acquired a different form, in terms of their role, status, problems, challenges and opportunities. The partition of the country divided them in two and later three parts and led their political, bureaucratic and intellectual elite to migrate to Pakistan. The expert opinion was divided about their very future. W.C. Smith, a renowned scholar of Islam, for instance, believed that Islam in India would emerge as more progressive, dynamic, liberal and creative than Pakistani Islam . The fact that Muslims in India bear the same proportion in Indian Population as those in the world bear to the world population, make their experience of universal value. Religion has two components. One is set of theological beliefs and practices. Two as a basis of a social identity. Even those who do not follow its beliefs and practices and are agnostics or atheists are an integral part of a religious community. This book is primarily a study of Muslim community since partition. But some references to pre-partition lessons and Islam, based on its acknowledged authorities, were inevitable for the study of contemporary problems of the community. This study of micro problems of Indian Muslims is a humble contributioin to the vastly grown scholarly work on macro Islam. About The Author: - Balraj Puri, started his public career in 1942 as editor of a Urdu weekly in Jammu. He has written over a thousand articles and authored or co-authored around forty books. Intercommunity relations and problems and potentialities of Muslims in India have been a matter of his special interest, as a social and political activist as also a writer. Apart from intervening in many conflict situation, he has been extensively writing on these subjects for national dailies and academic journals and addressed many academic gatherings. He has been interacting with Muslim scholars and leaders of the country belonging to various scholars of thought. He is vice-president of the Minority Council

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.