Overview

Numbering more than 150 million, Muslims constitute the largest minority in India, yet they suffer the most politically and socioeconomically. Forced to contend with severe and persistent prejudice, India's Muslims are often targets of violence and collective acts of murder. While the quality of Muslim life may lag behind that of Hindus nationally, local and inclusive cultures have been resilient in the south and the east. Within India's cities, however, the challenges Muslims face can be harder to read. In the Hindi belt and in the north, Muslims have known less peace, especially in the riot-prone areas of Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, and Aligarh, and in the capitals of former Muslim states -- Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Lucknow. These cities are rife with Muslim ghettos and slums. However, self-segregation has also played a part in forming Muslim enclaves, such as in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and a new Muslim middle class have regrouped for physical and cultural protection. Combining firsthand testimony with sound critical analysis, this volume follows urban Muslim life in eleven Indian cities, providing uncommon insight into a little-known but highly consequential subject.

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Reviews

Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot have assembled an impressive array of scholars to produce a fascinating portrait of the state of India's Muslim communities in various urban settings. The analyses in this volume are well-researched, offer new insights and provide a complex, and often disturbing, accounts of the state of Muslim communities across metropolitan India. The contributors to this work have eschewed facile generalisations, have provided fine-grained accounts and have displayed an admirable sensitivity to both historical as well as contemporary social forces that have helped define the current socio-economic and political conditions of India's most sizable minority in their urban milieus. This work will will contribute much to addressing an important lacuna in the pertinent literature on the contemporary politics and status of India's Muslim minority. -- Sumit Ganguly, Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia

Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot have assembled an impressive array of scholars to produce a fascinating portrait of the state of India's Muslim communities in various urban settings. The analyses in this volume are well-researched, offer new insights and provide a complex, and often disturbing, accounts of the state of Muslim communities across metropolitan India. The contributors to this work have eschewed facile generalisations, have provided fine-grained accounts and have displayed an admirable sensitivity to both historical as well as contemporary social forces that have helped define the current socio-economic and political conditions of India's most sizable minority in their urban milieus. This work will will contribute much to addressing an important lacuna in the pertinent literature on the contemporary politics and status of India's Muslim minority. -- Sumit Ganguly, Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia 'Urban India, the locus of India'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 India's 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. Jaffrelot and Gayer's substantial volume at once illuminates empirical conditions and tests theories about ghettoisation, integration, and political attitudes of India's urban Muslims. -- Sunil Khilnani, Director, India Institute, King's College London

Author Information

Laurent Gayer is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), currently posted at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) in New Delhi. He is also research associate at the Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud in Paris. Christophe Jaffrelot is research director at CNRS and teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po (Paris), as well as at King's College, London. From 2000 to 2008, he served as director of CERI at Sciences Po and is 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: Fighting the Indian Caste System.

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