This book studies how marginality impacts the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. It challenges the prevailing myths and stereotypes through which Indian Muslims have come to be seen in the popular imagination. The volume engages with questions of citizenship, collective violence, and issues of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It explores the linkages between development, marginality, and citizenship – the three critical issues for modern democracies today. Going beyond the singular narrative of a community on a continuous slide, the chapters in this volume present diversities of the Muslim experience of exclusion and participation. It discusses themes such as violence and marginality among minorities; Indian Muslims and the ghettoized economy; employment aspirations of low-income Muslim men; intergenerational social mobility of Muslims; the nature of the middle class; and the question of Islam, development, and globalization to showcase the living conditions of Muslims in India. Part of the Religion and Citizenship series, this timely volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, political sociology, minority studies, public policy, religion, citizenship studies, diversity and inclusion studies, and social anthropology.

This book studies how marginality impacts the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. It challenges the prevailing myths and stereotypes through which Indian Muslims have come to be seen in the popular imagination. The volume engages with questions of citizenship, collective violence, and issues of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It explores the linkages between development, marginality, and citizenship – the three critical issues for modern democracies today. Going beyond the singular narrative of a community on a continuous slide, the chapters in this volume present diversities of the Muslim experience of exclusion and participation. It discusses themes such as violence and marginality among minorities; Indian Muslims and the ghettoized economy; employment aspirations of low-income Muslim men; intergenerational social mobility of Muslims; the nature of the middle class; and the question of Islam, development, and globalization to showcase the living conditions of Muslims in India. Part of the Religion and Citizenship series, this timely volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, political sociology, minority studies, public policy, religion, citizenship studies, diversity and inclusion studies, and social anthropology.

South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with nationalisms of various kinds - religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural and exclusivist. In all the region s major states, officially promulgated nationalism at various times has been fiercely contested by minority groups intent on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their own cultural inheritance.

This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the nation state in South Asia. It examines three different kinds of minority articulations cultural conclaves with real or fictitious attachments to an imaginary homeland, the identity problems of dispersed minorities with no territorial claims and the aspirations of indigenous communities, tribes or ethnicities.

The essays in this volume offer a rich menu: the evolution of Naga nationalism, the construction of the territory-less Sylheti identity, the debates over Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan, the evolution of Muslim nationalism in Sri Lanka, the politics of religious minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the making of minority politics in India, and questions of Islam and nationalism in colonial India. It is an eclectic mix for students of nationalism, politics, modern history and anyone interested in the evolution of South Asia.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture."

The blood-laden birth-pangs of the Indian "nation-state" undoubtedly had a bearing on the contentious issue of group rights for cultural minorities. Indeed, the trajectory of the concept 'minority rights' evolved amidst multiple conceptualizations, political posturing and violent mobilizations and outbursts. Accommodating minority groups posed a predicament for the fledgling "nation-state" of post-colonial India. This book compares and contrasts Muslim and Sikh communities in pre- and post-Partition India. Mapping the evolving discourse on minority rights, the author looks at the overlaps between the Constitutional and the majoritarian discourse being articulated in the public sphere and poses questions about the guaranteeing of minority rights. The book suggests that through historical ruptures and breaks , communities oscillate between being minorities and nations. Combining archival material with ethnographic fieldwork, it studies the identity groups and their vexed relationship to the ideas of nation and nationalism. It captures meanings attributed to otherwise politically loaded concepts such as nation, nation-state and minority rights in the everyday world of Muslims and Sikhs and thus tries to make sense of the patterns of accommodation, adaptation and contestation in the life-world. Successfully confronting and illuminating the challenge of reconciling representation and equality both for groups and within groups, this exploration of South Asian nationalisms and communal relations will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, in particular Sociology and Politics.

The blood-laden birth-pangs of the Indian "nation-state" undoubtedly had a bearing on the contentious issue of group rights for cultural minorities. Indeed, the trajectory of the concept 'minority rights' evolved amidst multiple conceptualizations, political posturing and violent mobilizations and outbursts. Accommodating minority groups posed a predicament for the fledgling "nation-state" of post-colonial India. This book compares and contrasts Muslim and Sikh communities in pre- and post-Partition India. Mapping the evolving discourse on minority rights, the author looks at the overlaps between the Constitutional and the majoritarian discourse being articulated in the public sphere and poses questions about the guaranteeing of minority rights. The book suggests that through historical ruptures and breaks , communities oscillate between being minorities and nations. Combining archival material with ethnographic fieldwork, it studies the identity groups and their vexed relationship to the ideas of nation and nationalism. It captures meanings attributed to otherwise politically loaded concepts such as nation, nation-state and minority rights in the everyday world of Muslims and Sikhs and thus tries to make sense of the patterns of accommodation, adaptation and contestation in the life-world. Successfully confronting and illuminating the challenge of reconciling representation and equality both for groups and within groups, this exploration of South Asian nationalisms and communal relations will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, in particular Sociology and Politics.

South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with nationalisms of various kinds - religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural and exclusivist. In all the region s major states, officially promulgated nationalism at various times has been fiercely contested by minority groups intent on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their own cultural inheritance.

This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the nation state in South Asia. It examines three different kinds of minority articulations cultural conclaves with real or fictitious attachments to an imaginary homeland, the identity problems of dispersed minorities with no territorial claims and the aspirations of indigenous communities, tribes or ethnicities.

The essays in this volume offer a rich menu: the evolution of Naga nationalism, the construction of the territory-less Sylheti identity, the debates over Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan, the evolution of Muslim nationalism in Sri Lanka, the politics of religious minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the making of minority politics in India, and questions of Islam and nationalism in colonial India. It is an eclectic mix for students of nationalism, politics, modern history and anyone interested in the evolution of South Asia.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

The second volume in the Rethinking India series explicates what it means to be a minority in majoritarian times. The contributors identify vulnerabilities that encumber the quest for the realization of substantive citizenship by minority groups. The essays deal with educational attainments, employment prospects in a liberalized economy, possibilities of equal opportunity, violence of the state and vigilante groups, emerging questions of citizenship and employment, linking language with the material life of its speakers, and the receding political voice of minorities amidst a majoritarian upswing. Also examined is the concept of minority being inextricably bound with two allied ideas equally foundational to the vision of the Indian Republic: secularism and nationalism. The three together form a conceptual whole to the extent that none finds its manifestation without reference to the other two. The take-offs of the minority question in India include the archetypal nationalist's disapproval of the very endurance of the subject post-Independence. The secular-modernists and the Hindutva nationalists converge in prescribing assimilation-one into a modernist project, the other into a national culture defined by Sanskritic Hinduism-while the pluralist vision, tolerant of divergent practices, follies in assuming cultures and religious observances as frozen. This, along with several allied issues, forms the heart of this thought-provoking volume.