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Predicaments of secularism: Muslim identities and politics in Mumbai
Abstract
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.
... 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). ...
Chapter 2 introduces the Popular Front of India (PFI), its founding spirit, funding and membership structures as well as its organisational history to address how the PFI has been produced by the history and geography of South India. Then, by reviewing the literature on the emergence of Hindu nationalism, I show how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been expanding beyond its traditional North Indian focus and has entered South India, in particular in the coastal area of Karnataka where the PFI has a strong support base. The final section of the chapter highlights the new type of Muslim citizenship politics, which is partly a response to the emergence of Hindu nationalism. I also argue that Muslim citizenship politics is supported by the social policies of the INC and I contrast it with the dominant ulama-led style of Muslim minority politics from the colonial period onwards. Tracing the historical pattern of Muslim politics in India helps to make clear the need to better understand contemporary Muslim citizenship movements and explore the challenges they face in attracting mass following from ordinary Muslims and non-Muslims.
... 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'. ...
... 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'. ...
This paper explores the ways in which particular individuals or groups are cast as problematically other at certain times by exploring the relationship between empathy and antipathy – identified as products of ‘resonance’, or a certain kind of responsiveness to embodied encounters with others and also to concerns, ideas and discourses that originate locally or from elsewhere. Consequent effects on subject-formation and affordances of social possibilities are explored through an intensive focus on one Muslim man. The notion of a ‘laminated subjectivity’ is presented and elucidated. The paper draws on ethnography conducted in a Tamil town and is set against the backdrop of Hindu–Muslim relations in India.
... 42 Being confronted with few alternatives, Muslim constituencies supported the INC, and later INC oppositions, as well as various emerging regional and lowcaste parties since the 1970s, as the INC increasingly used identity politics against religious minorities to consolidate its Hindu vote-base. 43 Those Muslim candidates within INC and other secular coalitions refrained from speaking up for Muslim interests being concerned over losing the Hindu majority support. 44 From the 1970s onwards, low-caste and Dalit movements started to assert public demands and challenged the top-down INC patronage. ...
Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with two Islamist movements in
India since 2011, this article contributes to a better understanding
of how Muslim community leaders try to spearhead third front
alliances with secular and religious minorities through discourses
of shared political and economic victimhood and the provision of
protection against the assertions of Hindu nationalists in an era of
unprecedented Hindu vote consolidation. While such alliances
exist, the paper analyzes a new trend within Muslim politics that
promotes a political departure from the traditional patronage of
the Indian National Congress (INC) and other low-caste and socialist parties, which have historically represented the Muslim masses.
I then discuss the limitations of these third front leadership ambitions, whereby Islamist movements are seen as incompatible with
gender equality and secular norms. Theoretically, the paper
informs the academic debate on coalition-building processes
within social movement theory (SMT), which has partially ignored
the role of conservative religious actors in democratic as well as
authoritarian systems.
... In this Gordian knot of the pan-European internationalism of the EU, the pro-European Scottish and Irish nationalism of the SNP and Sinn Fein, the Eurosceptic British unionism of the Conservative Party in England and Scotland, and the staunchly anti-European ultra-British unionism of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland, what does it mean to be an Orangeman? And what, in this context, can Orange debates about the 'dirty politics' (Blom Hansen 2000) of Scottish independence and Brexit tell us about the notion of urgency? How do acute political crises triggered by time-bound referenda, for example, relate to chronic (and thus less urgent, if no less serious, and certainly no less 'dirty') religious confl icts founded on deep-seated sectarian bigotry? ...
The Orange Order is an ultra-Protestant and ultra-British fraternity dedicated to professing ‘hostility to the distinctive despotism of the Church of Rome’, and to preserving Scotland's constitutional place within the UK. According to Scots-Orangemen, these two commitments are united in opposing Scottish National Party capitulations to a Papacy hell-bent on cleaving Scotland from the UK and her Protestant monarch. Thus, while the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum posed an existential threat to Orange Protestant-unionism, Brexit allowed push-back against an ultramontane plot to use the EU to destroy British sovereignty. Ironically – and awkwardly – the British unionism of Brexit (which the Order celebrates) looks set to reinvigorate calls for Scottish independence (which the Order dreads). This paper examines the acute political crises that such referendums create, arguing that Orange political urgency can only be understood as part of a more chronic (and thus less urgent, if no less serious) ‘Roman’ threat to Protestant ethno-religious supremacy.
L'Ordre d'Orange est une fraternité ultra-protestante et ultra-britannique qui se consacre à professer son “hostilité au despotisme distinctif de l’Église de Rome” et à préserver la place constitutionnelle de l’Écosse au sein du Royaume-Uni. Selon les Écossais-Orangistes, ces deux engagements s'unissent pour s'opposer aux capitulations du Scottish National Party devant une papauté déterminée à séparer l’Écosse du Royaume-Uni et de son monarque protestant. Ainsi, alors que le référendum de 2014 sur l'indépendance de l’Écosse représentait une menace existentielle pour le protestantisme orangiste, le Brexit a permis de repousser un complot ultramontain visant à utiliser l'Union Européenne (UE) pour détruire la souveraineté britannique. Ironiquement ¬— et maladroitement — l'unionisme britannique du Brexit (que l'Ordre célèbre) semble destiné à revigorer les appels à l'indépendance de l’Écosse (que l'Ordre redoute). Cet article examine les crises politiques aiguës que de tels référendums créent, en soutenant que l'urgence politique de l'Ordre d'Orange ne peut être comprise que comme faisant partie d'une menace “romaine” plus chronique (et donc moins urgente, mais non moins sérieuse) pour la suprématie ethno-religieuse protestante.
... Various commentators of minority politics have observed that in the post-Babri, Mandal and Sachar era, Muslim politics has shifted to a plebeian, citizenship and right-centred politics from the traditional identity-centred, inward-looking communitarian politics. 14 (Alam, 2008;Hansen, 2000;Jodhka, 2007). They argue that, especially after the Sachar Committee report in 2005 exposed the socio-economic backwardness of Muslims in India, Muslim politics in general has taken a secular turn with more emphasis on issues related to social and economic development of the community rather than identity-related issues. ...
We examine the competing processes of ethnicization taking place among Hindu and Muslim religious communities in the coastal region of Karnataka state in South India in the broader context of hegemonic ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in the country. We describe how an array of militant Hindutva organizations use an institutionalized system of religious vigilantism and violence against minorities to construct an ethnicized, exclusivist moral community of Hindus in the region. This construction of an ethno-Hinduism by a clever depoliticizing of caste inequalities and violence seeks to produce and naturalize religious difference into an incorrigible and exclusivist ethnic identity that thrives on a continuous process of enemy-making. Responding to this predatory ethnicization executed by militant Hindutva organizations, and capitalizing on the pervasive sense of alienation and anxiety of the Muslims in the region, radical Islamic organizations engage in a counter-predatory ethnicization of Muslim communities in the region. These organizations, while officially articulating secular positions, use the language of self-defence and securitization, coupled with radical Islamic identity for mass mobilization, to create an exclusive Islamic moral community, often mirroring the tactics of Hindutva vigilante organizations. We conclude that these competing processes of ethnicization of religious identities and the emergence of a ‘vigilante public’ will have far-reaching consequences for the central facets of democracy such as citizenship and secularism while leaving the socio-cultural spaces in coastal Karnataka highly polarized on religious lines and peaceful co-existence of religious communities challenging and undesirable.
... The SP, a regional political party with its stronghold in Uttar Pradesh, aiming for a nationwide political presence moved to Mumbai in 1994 through alliances with a number of prominent business people and their extensive informal networks of petty entrepreneurs in order to consolidate the support of its north Indian and Muslim voters. This represented a more pragmatic strategy of "plebeian assertion" post the 1992-93 riots linked to a new assertiveness in the political fi eld through a north Indian lower-caste political formation (Hansen 2000). Though religious leaders and the educated Muslim elite and middle class who traditionally vote for the Congress, denounced it as a "goonda party", it enjoyed a growing popularity among the ajlaf (lower caste) Muslims in the city. ...
An ethnography of everyday life in Shivaji Nagar, a predominantly Muslim slum locality in Mumbai, illustrates how its "Muslimness" complicates the residents' access to water, a commodified and politicised amenity. The struggles of local Muslims to access water also involve holding the state accountable through localised "mundane" politics at the periphery. The state's inability to address the differential access to water is challenged through locally elected political representatives. The paper also explores the role of "intermediaries" who are accused of being the "water mafia" by the state and the English media and argues that they play an important role in making the state accessible through acts of subversion and collaboration.
... However, the 1990s witnessed an interesting differentiation within the community politics of the Muslims, at least in some pockets of India. This process has been well-documented by T B Hansen for Maharashtra [Hansen 2000]. ...
It is in the larger context of the changing nature of the political process in India that we need to locate the real significance of the Sachar Committee report and the kind of response it has received from different political formations, including the secular left. Perhaps more important than the data that it has been able to marshal in support of its formulations on the development deficit among the Indian Muslims is the manner in which it has dealt with the subject.
... The BBC's colonial past became a frame for the BBC in both senses, a frame by which the picture is distinguished from others and made visible, and a frame that is presented as only the backdrop for the glory of the picture itself. 36 The British colonial government had, as many have documented, in the period of mature colonialism represented its own moral imperative and imperial duty as the voice of reason and harmony standing between two communal forces, Hindu and Muslim (Pandey 1990, Hansen 2000 which upon decolonization became ever more part of the retrospective narrative of colonial rule. What was noble about the cause of freedom and democracy was that which was given to the subcontinent by British rule. ...
This article explores the BBC's transition from colonial to postcolonial broadcaster in South Asia from 1940 to 1955. It argues that the BBC occupied a special place within the subcontinent in its own, and others' imaginations, by virtue of its (disavowed) yet (for it) productive colonial origins. The article focuses in particular on the Indian staff of the BBC pre and post independence and takes the BBC as a hierarchically constituted but creative collegial space. It examines: (1) the collegial relationships within BBC Bush House in London, as well as those that played out between the BBC, All India Radio (AIR) and Radio Pakistan (RP); and (2) the BBC and colonial British India and postcolonial India and Pakistan. Both interpersonal and macro‐level relationships were at times read by those within them as a relationship between Britain and its former colonies, with all that entails.
Ethno-religious violence has a long history in Sri Lanka dating far back as 1883.
The Muslims of Sri Lanka have been victims of sporadic attacks by the
Sinhalese and Tamil majorities since the early 1900s with the most recent
attack being in 2014. While the recent turn towards violence against the Muslim
community in Sri Lanka can be attributed to the “ethno-nationalist rivalries”
(McGilvray 2011) of the Sinhala Buddhist (political) majority of Sri Lanka, this
paper hypothesises that anti-Muslim sentiments are also a result of the
internal conflicts regarding the practice of Islam within the Muslim community.
These conflicts, manifested in the form of visible, symbolic Islamisation, cause
suspicion and fear among members of other communities.
This book analyses the emerging trend of Muslim-minority politics in India and illustrates that a fundamental shift has occurred over the last 20 years from an identity-dominated, self-serving and inward-looking approach by Muslim community leaders, Islamic authorities and social activists that seeks to protect Islamic law and culture, towards an inclusive debate centred on socio-economic marginalisation and minority empowerment.
The book focuses on Muslim activists, and members and affiliates of the Popular Front of India (PFI), a growing Muslim-minority and youth movement. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork undertaken since 2011, the author analyses recent literature on Muslim citizenship politics and the growing involvement of Islamist organisations and movements in the democratic process and electoral politics to demonstrate that religious groups play a role in politics, development, and policy making, which is often ignored within political theory. The book suggests that further scrutiny is needed of the assumption that Muslim politics and Islamic movements are incompatible with the democratic political framework of the modern nation state in India and elsewhere.
Contributing to a more nuanced understanding of how Islamic movements utilise various spiritual, organisational and material resources and strategies for collective action, community development and democratic engagement, the book will be of interest to academics in the field of political Islam, South Asian studies, sociology of religion and development studies.
When it comes to historical and ethnographic accounts of transport labour outside the West, scholars have only recently intervened to correct the paucity of systematic scholarship in this area. This article is in conversation with scholarship in both labour history and urban anthropology through which it links the modern history of a particular mode of urban transport (the taxi) and the labouring history of those who drive, move, and fix it. Through a focus on a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia in the Indian city of Bombay/Mumbai, this article expands our understanding of labour experiences of the city through the twentieth century and into the present. It moves between historical archives, oral history, and lived experience to illuminate how the labour of transport workers structures circulations, collective identities, and urban space. It explores several dimensions of the history and present of transport labour in India. First, it is concerned with the connection between the work of hereditary motoring and the reconfiguration and constitution of communal identities in contexts of urban labour migration. Second, it is interested how labour practices become embedded in broader social and cultural space. Third, given that chillia have continued in the trade for over 100 years, the article explores the circuits of work and labour surrounding their trade to illuminate intersections between political and cultural shifts in Mumbai, changing conditions of work in contemporary contexts of globalizing capital, and the forms of ‘non-consent’ that emerge out of these networks.
In Casting Faiths, Thomas DuBois seeks to understand the transformation of “the definition, practice and social significance of religion” in Asia at three levels—society, theology, and technology—under the impact of the East–West encounter—or what he calls imperial hegemony in his programmatic article “Hegemony, Imperialism and the construction of religion in East and Southeast Asia.” The chapters of this volume shed light on processes of religious transformation via different configurations of society, theology, and technology as brought out in the varying connections of religion with scholarship, with missions and missionizing, with state, nation, and ethnicity, and with commerce and media. This Afterword is not the place to discuss to what extent these wide-ranging individual case studies succeed in linking up the particular with the broad strokes applied by DuBois in his Introduction, which detects a historic paradigmatic change in religion in East and Southeast Asia, and perhaps promises a paradigmatic change in our understanding thereof. Rather, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on some implications from my reading of the chapters within the framework of the “promise” of a paradigmatic change made in the introduction; on questions they raise in my mind about religion in connection with notions of secularism; and on highly provisional and speculative answers to these questions.
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.
In 1926, the historic city center of Beirut, the capital of the six-year-old Republic of Lebanon, was redesigned as the new public and institutional center for the city. Around twenty years later, Chandigarh was constructed as a new regional capital for the state of Punjab in newly independent India. This essay will use the architectural and urban characteristics of these two capital cities (the first national and the latter regional) to explore the relationship between the establishment of a postcolonial "secular" state, the constitution of a national public, and the formation of a public sphere. The basic premise for this investigation is that the creation of a public sphere in both of these countries was a historically and politically specific project. Accordingly, the essay will argue that the identification in the case of Lebanon and the constitution in the case of India of public subjects were historically contingent projects. This project was rooted in the establishment of independent nation-states that encompassed religiously plural societies and in the place that secularism was accorded in these states. In other words the projection of public subjects and of public spheres occurred within the imaginaries modern nation-state and not as a derivative by-product of the structural transformations of European history.1 Such historical grounding is not only political. It also assumes spatial and temporal dimensions that are seldom considered. Particular spatial practices and architectural edifices were deployed so as to bring a specific national (and secular) public into being. Architecture here was assigned the role of mediating national identity or the sociocultural forms of the new institutional (political) structures of the state. In time these edifices became shorthand, so to speak, for the public identity of these new nation-states. This neglect of spatial practices is due to interconnected approaches in the scholarship on the public sphere and nationalism. Firstly, mainstream public sphere theory saw the public sphere primarily as an arena of communicative action and deliberation. Secondly, theories of the emergence of national subjects failed to account for the role of spatial categories and architectural iconographies in the constitution of its different publics. Finally, this neglect of the historical and spatial grounding of the public sphere is also the by-product of an opposing trend in the literature that uses the terms public space and public sphere interchangeably and thus depoliticizes the process by which space is constituted. Such a perspective raises various epistemological questions about the nature of the public sphere and of public space and challenges some of the common taken-forgranted opinions about its emergence.
In recent years anthropology has rediscovered its interest in politics. Building on the findings of this research, this book, first published in 2007, analyses the relationship between culture and politics, with special attention to democracy, nationalism, the state and political violence. Beginning with scenes from an unruly early 1980s election campaign in Sri Lanka, it covers issues from rural policing in north India to slum housing in Delhi, presenting arguments about secularism and pluralism, and the ambiguous energies released by electoral democracy across the subcontinent. It ends by discussing feminist peace activists in Sri Lanka, struggling to sustain a window of shared humanity after two decades of war. Bringing together and linking the themes of democracy, identity and conflict, this important new study shows how anthropology can take a central role in understanding other people's politics, especially the issues that seem to have divided the world since 9/11.
From the cleric-led Iranian revolution to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, many people have been surprised by what they see as the modern reemergence of an antimodern phenomenon. This book helps account for the increasingly visible public role of traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (the ulama) across contemporary Muslim societies. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the transformations the centuries-old culture and tradition of the ulama have undergone in the modern era--transformations that underlie the new religious and political activism of these scholars. In doing so, it provides a new foundation for the comparative study of Islam, politics, and religious change in the contemporary world.While focusing primarily on Pakistan, Zaman takes a broad approach that considers the Taliban and the ulama of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, and the southern Philippines. He shows how their religious and political discourses have evolved in often unexpected but mutually reinforcing ways to redefine and enlarge the roles the ulama play in society. Their discourses are informed by a longstanding religious tradition, of which they see themselves as the custodians. But these discourses are equally shaped by--and contribute in significant ways to--contemporary debates in the Muslim public sphere.This book offers the first sustained comparative perspective on the ulama and their increasingly crucial religious and political activism. It shows how issues of religious authority are debated in contemporary Islam, how Islamic law and tradition are continuously negotiated in a rapidly changing world, and how the ulama both react to and shape larger Islamic social trends. Introducing previously unexamined facets of religious and political thought in modern Islam, it clarifies the complex processes of religious change unfolding in the contemporary Muslim world and goes a long way toward explaining their vast social and political ramifications.
The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi‘ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its entanglement with state regulation of religion. An advertising campaign by a Shi‘ite media center illustrates that such religious activism with global ramifications can only be understood if one also takes its intersection with state-sponsored regimes of religious diversity into account. Media practices of Indian Muslims as a vulnerable minority are especially responsive to normative discourses and images of religious diversity, and mobilize alternative strands of Indian secularism in order to counteract the fragility of their citizenship.
This paper examines the dynamics of religion and democratic politics by looking at political mobilisations of marginalised groups in Punjab and Maharashtra. It argues that even when religious identity remains the bedrock of social life and individual experience, democratic politics brings out new configurations and alignments, in which neat boundaries of religious difference are occasionally blurred or overwritten by other identities. The Indian experience also reveals that religious groups are not homogeneous. While political mobilisation tends to unite them as communities with common interests, development policies have invariably disaggregated them, reinforcing the internal divisions and diversities within religious communities.
The content of this study is a report prepared by a research group on the perspective of women on various issues related to Islamic radicalism, i.e., concept, phenomenon and Islamic societies. This study also examines women's level of understanding about Islam nature and the factors that led to radical behavior and effects of radical action. Results arepresented based on 863 smvey respondents amongst Muslim women who were selected from several states in Malaysia. Primarydata collection was undertaken through a set of structured questionnaires. There are three significant findings from this study. First, this study found that women's understanding of Islam is comparatively lower than male respondents. This level of understanding has affected their perceptions of radical phenomena. Second, their perception on the phenomenon of radicalism is also lower than male respondents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.