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Predicaments of secularism: Muslim identities and politics in Mumbai

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Most of the debate about secularism and the secular state in India has remained at a general level, leaving a great many gaps in our knowledge of the actual meanings and practices associated with secularism in India. This article argues that secularism in India is premised on an unstable separation of a realm of politics from a supposedly unpolitical realm of culture, where communities have been represented in rather static and undifferentiated terms. Discussing ethnographic material from Muslim neighbourhoods in Mumbai the author shows how the separation between ‘pure’ culture and ‘dirty’ politics is breaking down in the face of a new political assertiveness among ordinary, low-status Muslims. This challenges the position of religious leaders and it also questions widely held assumptions of the relative coherence of the Muslim community.

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... The Deobandi ulama spawned a vast network of madrasahs working to revitalise Islamic traditions. The traditionalist Deobandi movement with its various offsprings, including the JIH Tablighi Jamaat, shaped the standards of doctrinal purity concerning Islamic practices, beliefs and piety (tabligh) of common (Barelvi/ Sufi) Muslims by proclaiming an inward-looking jihad (Hansen 2000;Metcalf 2004Metcalf , 2005. In doing so, the Deobandi ulama ensured that they alone could preserve the Islamic tradition under British rule. ...
... After Partition, the ulama leadership continued to focus its energy on patrolling community boundaries, addressing threats to Islam via offensive articles and books and defending the Muslim personal law and Islamic rituals. In other words, the ulama fought against assimilation into mainstream culture and harshly criticised Muslim elites and secularists who spoke in favour of relegating Islam to the private sphere and integrating into the majority culture (Hansen 2000;Metcalf 2004;Robinson 2007). In this context, the ulama served as legitimate leaders of the community, wielding the ability to mobilise the masses and control local regional and national Muslim organisations (I. ...
... Ahmad 2008). Consequently, political campaigns for political unity and cohesion by Muslim leaders have been interpreted as an attempt to maintain privileges, hierarchies and legitimacy within traditional leadership structures and organisations in a highly stratified and gendered Muslim population (Hansen 2000;Alam 2007). ...
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... Non-Hindus (particularly Muslims) are sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly viewed as outsiders and aggressors within this political philosophy. What the rise of Hindutva has meant for Muslims around India is still a matter for research, although some effects such as increased communal tension and violence are more visible and hence more studied, albeit from different perspectives (Hansen 2000(Hansen , 2001Varshney 2002;Brass 2003;Sen 2007). It is, however, reasonably certain that the understanding of India as a Hindu nation is widespread, rendering non-Hindus and especially Muslims as 'problematic minorities'. ...
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Is the paradigm of the universal/particular or the politics of inclusion/exclusion adequate to conceptualize the cultural citizenship that the secular state grants to communities marginalized through sociopolitical hierarchies such as caste? Or does the framing of this question in these terms mask a more primary metaphor, that of the condition of the ban or exile that forms the counterpart of secular citizenship? When the secular state lays the foundation for special citizenship based on forms of cultural marginality, it creates a certain relationship between the part and the whole, the particular and the universal. Integral to this is the constant effort to present the state itself in universal terms in order to fulfill its own representational promise. Yet, as Slavoj Zizek points out, the paradox between the particular and the universal is such that the more particular or special interests the state accepts into its fold on the grounds of their particularity, the more particularized and depoliticized do such communities feel. Cultural citizenship thus results in a curious paradox where, as Zizek puts it, "the African American single lesbian mother" is forever denied the possibility of the "metaphoric elevation" of her wrong as the universal wrong.1 In this essay, I focus on the visual imagery of exile created by a particular, marginalized community in India to argue that this seemingly inessential particular- in the visual staging of its condition of banishment-points to the symbolic violence inherent in the public, secular, narrative of sovereign power. The community whose visual interventions I analyze here are the traditional "outcastes" of sweepers and sanitation workers of New Delhi, India, the Balmikis. Constitutionally classified as Scheduled Castes, the Balmikis, who are primarily waste workers, have long occupied the lowest rungs of the Hindu caste hierarchy.2 The visual metaphors of banishment projected by this community, I contend, are not simply an assertion of "particular" community/caste identity. On the contrary, the enactment of exile and its visual staging script a scenario in which banishment actually precedes citizenship; it signifies the critical impossibility of the "particular minority" as a viable form of secular citizenship. Giorgio Agamben's work takes us to the biopolitical power relations between sovereign power and bare life that precede or are foundational to the state-citizen contract. "All representations of the originary political act as a contract or convention marking the passage from nature to the State in a discrete and definite way must be left behind," he writes. The primary relation is not a civil contract, but a ban, also corresponding to the ancient mythologeme of exile. "What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of one who abandons it-at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured."3 The life of the exile, he writes, borders on the life of homo sacer, bare life, who may be killed at the will of sovereign power without being sacrificed. Yet the mythic philosophical context from which Agamben constructs his logic cannot be so quickly translated into the Indian context; instead, it must be carefully worked through in the context of specific tropes of sovereignty, bare life, and banishment.4 The Ramayana, the epic southeast Asian mythological text from which the Balmiki community draws its own cultural identity and images of exile and banishment, is striking in its mythical-philosophical theorization of sovereignty and exile (as does the Mahabharata and a host of other mythological tales regarding kingly power).5 Traveling between the spaces of the kingdom and the forest, the epic tells the story of a prince, Rama, his wife Sita, and the karmic web through which sovereign power must assert itself. In both kingdom and forest, Rama has the exclusive righteous authority to kill or to take the life of anyone deemed to violate a contingently defined dharma, the path of right action. The phenomenally popular telecast of the Ramayana myth in India during 1987-88 made possible, for the first time on a national scale, an entire new vision and visual imagery of sovereign power through the religious idealization of the figure of Rama who combined secular ethos, Hindu divine authority, and righteous violence. The new Ramayana was a moment of rupture and a moment of suture in visual culture. Despite its cardboard sets, it reterritorialized the social semiotic of visual culture, public religios- ity, and state power in ways that seamlessly blended post-Nehruvian Congress secularism with the oncoming tide of the Hindutva movement The Rama of the 1987-88 telecast visually resembled the then Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in his aura of inherited absolute authority even as he foreshadowed the symbolic elements of the righteous violence of anti-Muslim Rama of the Hindutva movement in the 1990s. The scenes of banishment and the figures of the exiles projected by the Balmiki community, which I focus on, can be framed against the shadow of this new vision of righteous sovereign power. The Balmiki communities' version of the Ramayana drew on portions of the text excluded by the telecast to question the narrative of sovereignty that eulogized Rama. Their performative versions of the text counterposed the figures of exiles: That of the lower-caste ascetic, Valmiki, who is the patron-guru of the community, and that of the abandoned wife of the sovereign, Sita, and her "illegitimate" children, Lava and Kusha, who were brought up by the sage. Drawing from Agamben, again, the Balmikis' foregrounding of the figures of exile show how we may imagine the "structure of the ban" or the tropes of exile in "political relations and public spaces" as a counterpart to the tropes of sovereignty.6 I explore the tropes of exile at two moments that interrupt the semiotic coherence of the visual domain of hegemonic secular culture in India. By hegemonic secular culture, I mean the forging of a national-popular culture that persuasively represents itself as "universal" rather than "particular," and thus vests in itself the power to define the "secularity," or lack thereof, of publicly displayed symbols.7 Thus, for instance, the anticolonial nationalist movement in India, the postcolonial national culture that was built on the ground of anticolonialism, or Hindutva (the political movement to assert a specific version of Hinduism as national essence) in the 1990s created different scripts and languages of the secular that gained national hegemony. Rather than a reassuring national constant whose parameters were closely secured through the civil mediation of religion, state, and citizenship (both of communities and individuals), secularism after the 1990s in India appears as a shifting ideological terrain that reveals the irreducible violence of religion, state, and citizenship. The images of the exiles evoked by the Balmikis-the pregnant queen abandoned by the suspicious king, the children who symbolize the illicit of the nation, the guru whose power resides in renunciation rather than rule-suggest the symbolic violence of sovereign power. I deconstruct two moments-archival and ethnographic-in the Balmiki community's contemporary history where the "visions" of exile appear. Thomas B. Hansen points out that the intellectual debate on secular- ism in India has "rarely touched on the secular practices of the Indian state, what secularism means to ordinary people in India, how it is practiced on the ground."8 Rather than seek to define secularism in its positive meaning, the two moments explored here signify its failure in ways that unravel the relations between visual culture, marginalized community interests, and hegemonic secularism. Since the 1990s, visual media, including television and video, have played a critical role in redefining public cultures and national politics in India. Both Purnima Mankekar9 and Arvind Rajagopal10 have shown how television narratives of the 1990s restructured the discourses of nation, community, and religious affinity, propelling the growth of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalistic ethos in the public sphere. However, neither writer considers the television Ramayana as a text that also restructures the imaginaries of secularism. First, I draw on the telecast of the southeast Asian epic mythological text, Ramayana, and the reaction of the "audience" community of the Balmikis, to argue that coextensive with a new religiosity, the epic telecast also inaugurates a new sensibility of secularism. This new sensibility falls in line with Hindutva's "end of pluralist secularism" narrative, and it silently acknowledges the centrality or political mainstreaming of Hindu religious symbolism in public visual culture as a common national ("universal") point of discursive reference.
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Practices and ideals of confessional pluralism and liberal interpretations of Islam have achieved new prominence in Turkish civil society in recent years. In this article, I marshal fieldwork conducted among a variety of Turkish Islamic civil society institutions to argue that confessional pluralism and liberal Islam have reoriented practices of politics and secularism in Turkey. As I demonstrate, liberal discourse about religious difference emerges within civil society as a foil to hegemonic, homogeneous visions of Islam on the part of the state. My principal theoretical contribution is the civil society effect: how the institutions and discourses of civil society are idealized and rendered distinct from state power. Ethnographically, I focus on two religious groups that have achieved organization within civil society: Turkish Alevis and supporters of the Sunni Hizmet Movement.
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Matters of war and violence continue to prove seductive foci for geographical analysis, whereas the concept of peace has remained undertheorized, more often constructed in negative terms as the absence of violence. This article responds to calls within the academy and beyond for a more critical look at the geographies of peace, through an examination of everyday peace between “Hindu traders” and “Muslim weavers” in urban north India. Building on qualitative field research conducted between 2006 and 2008 in the silk sari industry in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the primary focus is on the lived realities of Muslim weaver subalterns. It shows how everyday peace is socially produced and reproduced through the interactive work of practice and narrative, which is embedded within a particular cultural political economy and intimately linked to local structures of power and politics. In the context of these intercommunity work relations, peace can be conceptualized as a by-product of interdependent economic relations, simultaneously constituting the conditions for its reproduction. For Muslim weavers who are more often marginalized within these economic spaces, learning, pragmatism, and resilience informed their actions to rework existing patterns of power without jeopardizing the future of everyday intercommunity peace. Illustrating the generative potential of peace, this article reinforces the need for further research into the seemingly empty expanses of social life that appear after or without politics.
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Since its inception, the contemporary women’s movement has had a contentious relationship with religion. This was demonstrated most clearly in the debates around the cases of Shah Bano and Roop Kanwar during the 1980s, which sparked a period of reflection within the women’s movement over the question of representation. Since then, the movement has evolved considerably, becoming increasingly institutionalised at one level, and at the same time experiencing fragmentation and diversification. This article looks at the emergence of two networks advocating Muslim women’s rights, the Muslim Women’s Rights Network (MWRN) and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), and contextualises their emergence within the wider context of the women’s movement and the evolution of feminism in India. MWRN and BMMA are indicative of the growing assertion of ‘minority feminisms’ in India and aim to represent women’s multiple identities, including their religious identities, while also struggling for gender justice. Both networks differ in the way they approach religion ideologically and strategically as well as in the way they position themselves vis-à-vis the women’s movement. However, their appearance marks an important shift both within the women’s movement as well as in the formulation of community identities in India, with ‘Muslim women’ being positively reformulated by these networks as a category that asserts political agency rather than passivity and victimhood.
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This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self-interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha. Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and social relations with rural elites who, seeking to maintain dominance, reproduce Munda imaginings. The article thus draws attention to multiple co-existing notions of politics and the importance of a local political economy in the social production of cultural imaginings of the state.
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Islamism may already be showing signs of meeting a more powerful ideological force: state nationalism. Islamists devote far more energy to attempting to take over existing states than to attacking the West. It is conceivable that, as with Pan-Arabism before it, the grandiose ideals of Islamism will be no match for the economic, military, and media might of the nation-states into which both Arabs and Muslims are separated. These appear to shape people's identity even more than do their potentially revolutionary shared religious tenets.
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What follows is basically a series of propositions. It is not meant for academics grappling with the issue of ethnic and religious violence as a cognitive puzzle but for concerned intellectuals and grassroots activists trying, in the language of Gustavo Esteva, to “regenerate people's space.” The aim of the article is threefold: (1) To systematize some available insights into the problem of ethnic and communal violence in South Asia, particularly India, from the point of view of those who do not see communalism and secularism as sworn enemies but as the disowned doubles of each other; (2) To acknowledge, as part of the same exercise, that Hindu nationalism, like other such ethnonationalisms, is not an “extreme” form of Hinduism but a modernist creed that seeks to retool Hinduism, on behalf of the global nation-state system, into a national ideology and the Hindus into a “proper” nationality; (3) To hint at an approach to religious tolerance in a democratic polity that is not dismissive toward the ways of life, idioms, and modes of informal social and political analyses of the citizens, even when they happen to be unacquainted with—or inhospitable to—the ideology of secularism.
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Modernists have represented the world and its history as divided into ‘medieval’ (or traditional) and ‘modern’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, and claimed that they will bring about humanity's ‘emancipation’ from the medieval. I argue that the world which modernists wish to bring into existence, far from entailing the erasure of the medieval, as claimed, involves the complex rearticulation of the medieval. Vital to the modern is not just the secularization of a previously sacred realm, upon which scholars have concentrated, but the sacralization of the mundane, pointed to by Foucault. The agent of modernist emancipation is a hypostatized sovereign Agent. The medievals engaged in certain practices which were supposed to embody a transcendent God in the human world and lead them to a celestial paradise. the moderns, silently transposing that god intoa foundational reason, assert that its manifesation in enlightened institutios will take them to a utopia which is none other than the surreptitious imporatation of the medieval paradise on earth. Imperial progresses and religious processions were, I argue, the foremost paractices by which medieval polities embodied the transcendent and attained to heaven. Modern polities, While treating them as mere ‘rituals’, have sublimated those very practices into an abstract material progress emanating from the economic practices of the entire nation represented as a vehicle on the move. Developed countries represented themselves, after recovering from World War II, as already moving at a fast clip and as living in a productionist and consumerist utopia. Underdeveloped countries like India, considered medieval, were represented as only beginning to move. They were to transfrom themselves into modern utopias through central planning andmassive projects such as dam building.