Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation (Comparative Politics and International Studies Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231703082 ISBN 13: 9780231703086

Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr, 2012

Synopsis

At 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--while waves of communal violence have affected them over the last twenty-five years.
In India's cities, these developments find contrasting expressions. While Muslims are 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 to Muslims in eleven Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first-hand account of this untold story.

About this title

Review:

"Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot have assembled an impressive array of scholars to produce a fascinating portrait of India's Muslim communities. The analyses are well-researched, offer new insights, and provide complex and often disturbing accounts of the state of Muslim communities across metropolitan India. The contributors eschew facile generalizations, provide fine-grained accounts, and display an admirable sensitivity to both historical and contemporary social forces that have helped define the current socioeconomic and political conditions of India's most sizable minority in its urban milieus. This work contributes much to addressing an important lacuna in the literature on the contemporary politics and status of India's Muslim minority."--Sumit Ganguly, author of Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947

"Urban India, the locus of the country's economic surge, is home to over a third of India's Muslims--and it is there that the diverse cultures of Muslim India once flourished. Yet today, India's urban Muslims are the most disprivileged of its urban citizens, and their life-chances are sharply constrained in every respect. In this pioneering set of political ethnographies, the predicament of Indian Muslims is examined across a dozen cities. Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot's substantial volume at once illuminates empirical conditions and tests theories about ghettoization, integration, and the political attitudes of India's urban Muslims."--Sunil Khilnani, director of the India Institute, King's College London

"Christophe Jaffrelot's range of scholarship is amazing, and his new book, Muslims in Indian Cities, coedited with Laurent Gayer, illustrates well his wide-ranging interests. The contributions are instructive and insightful and cover a much-neglected theme in contemporary South Asia."--Mushirul Hasan, director general of the National Archives of India

"This is certainly the best empirically-researched book on Muslims in contemporary India that I've read. It brilliantly highlights the magnitude of Muslim marginalization and the desperate need to address it."--Yoginder Sikand, author of Muslims In India Since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-Faith Relations and Bastions Of The Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education In India

"The volume is an important reference for researches on Muslims in contemporary India." -- Mohammad Talib, Oxford Journals Book Review

About the Author:

Christophe Jaffrelot is Research Director at CNRS and teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po (Paris). From 2000-8, he was Director of CERI at Sciences Po. Arguably one of the world's most respected writers on Indian society and politics, his publications include The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s, India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, and Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste, all of which are published by Hurst.
Laurent Gayer is a Research Fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), currently posted at the Centre de sciences humaines (CSH), Delhi. He is also Research Associate at the Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud, Paris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0231703082
• ISBN 13: 9780231703086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Gayer Laurent, Jaffrelot Christophe