The place of minority: politics of space and Muslims in contemporary urban India

The introduction provides the background to the complex formation of the post-colonial state and its relationship with this religious minority. The editors also point at the layered composition of the minority community in terms of caste, class, and the rural-urban divide in India. Muslims have an historical affinity with the urban and inhabited the city as the domain of cultural expression and economic progress. This rich historical relationship is often ignored in public discourse today. It is produced nostalgically with terms such as the ‘old city’, communally as the ‘Muslim area’ or more pejoratively as the ‘Muslim Ghetto’, in discussions about Muslims and the city. The editors show that while ‘ghetto’ has no Indian vernacular equivalent, the discourse of ghettoization governs common sense about Muslims in India. They rightly characterize this process as “a forcible relegation of a negatively defined community” (p21). The volume examines political, economic and social factors that underlie and shape these trajectories.

Tales of cities: riots, boundaries and production of a Muslim space

It is possible to read these case studies beyond the singular narrative of marginalization and look at crucial local specificities of Muslim social existence. The editors consider different patterns of segregation found in ghettos, enclaves and mixed areas. Some cases share a common trajectory of extreme violence manifested in riots, leading to dramatic spatial shifts in the city’s social landscape. This is evident from the study about Mumbai and Ahmedabad. In contrast, research done on Aligarh, Jaipur, Lucknow and Delhi indicates internal community politics of spatial and identity demarcations within Muslim communities. The third set of studies looks at decline, rather than marginalization, evident in the former Muslim princely states Bhopal and Hyderabad. And finally we come across the complexity of rapidly changing mixed cities today, increasingly redefining the space of Muslim inhabitants. This is evident in cities such as Calicut, Cuttack and Bangalore, which claim a syncretic past while exhibiting increasing conflicts based on competition for resources and inter-communal conflicts. Various other local, national and global factors seem to complicate these entangled aspects of marginalisation. Qudsiya Contractor finds the creation of Mumbai slum of Shivaji Nagar as a combined result of the partisan urban development by Indian state and communal politics of the Hindu right which utilised the 1984 and 1992-93 Bombay riots for removing Muslims from urban residence (p24). She shows how spaces like Shivaji Nagar are labelled as forbidden territory of butcheries and filth, peripheral to the cultural geography of Mumbai (p37). She also looks at the issue of marking space through symbolism and everyday practices like naming. She reveals how the myth of Shivaji Nagar as an exclusively Muslim area is not based on demography but operates through discursive processes of class, caste and group violence. These are actively resisted by the ghetto counter-public that stakes its claim to its multiple pasts by the acts of naming and everyday forms of negotiated claims with the state and dominant society. Riots also mark the history of Ahmedabad city and its Muslim inhabitants. The city with its ethnic mosaic and complex spatial politics defined by professional grouping and residence was transformed into ´riot city´ from 1960 onwards through the exploitation of class and caste conflicts by communal interests. The most horrific riot was the 2002 state-sponsored pogrom against Muslims. It was harnessed not just for electoral gain for the Hindu right but also for excluding Muslims from the social and urban space of the city pushing them into ghettos. Chritophe Jaffrelot and Charlotte Thomas identify different trajectories in history of Ahmadabad . The old city presents a sorry state but through self-help Muslim residents of the Juhapura locality have found a new mechanism for dealing with state-supported exclusions. The role of the state becomes important in marking these as dangerous spaces. So while it produces the notion of the backward Muslim ghetto by denying development programmes to the area, the state also affirms the dangers of the place by means of marking through police chaukis and signboards. This again points to the role of the state in actually producing both the stereotype of the backward and dirty Muslim area as well as the criminally dangerous Muslim ghetto. Production of space is not only based on role played by the state and its power structures, but also is a product of internal community politics of inhabitants and the resultant ordering of urban space. This latter aspect is evident in the case study of Aligarh where Juliette Galonnier finds the stark division between Shah Jamal, ´a peripheral backward locality´ and Sir Syed Nagar, the ´intelligentsia colony´ which owes its existence not to communal violence but as a project of Muslim intelligentsia to create a culture enclave for the educated elite separated from the lower classes. Galonnier pertinently observes that there are several Muslim localities in a city where communal segregation is subtended by social differentiation which is evident in the differentiation of urban space. Laurent Gayer examines the discourses around ´good environment´ as crucial factor in the project of constructing the Abul Fazl enclave in New Delhi . He argues that Muslims chose to move here for reasons besides security. This shows a process of alignment around issues of class and culture more than religion. The dynamism of class and cultural politics is also informed by caste and sectarian concerns. Gayer argues that this reflects self-segregation rather than ghettoisation (p235).Sectarianism defines the politics of space in the Kashmiri Mohalla of Lucknow. Gilles Verniers shows that historically the Shia-Sunni difference has mattered more than the communal divide in Lucknow. He maps the double marginalization of the erstwhile Shia elite area as a ´royal slum´.(p106). He locates the double marginalization of this minority within a minority both due to the state’s neglect and the social domination of Sunnis due to their greater access to employment in the Gulf economies, resulting in both economic and spatial marginalization of Shias in Lucknow. Gayatri Jai Singh studies the transformation from profession-based mohallas to communally demarcated localities in Jaipur´s Ramganj area. She dwells on the segregationist politics of the Jaipur Development Authority from 1980 onwards. However, within the Muslim ghetto she also identifies the persistence of local identities and loyalties. Mohallas of communities such as butchers, metal bearers, weavers and dyers are organized around occupational communities or biradari and differ amongst each other on both religious and political matters. (p99). These differences also arise from economic rivalry between different caste groups as well as different affiliations with sectarian ideologies. These divergent and conflicted histories are often ignored in the narrative of a singular ´Miyan identity´´ against occupation-based artisanal identifications (p100). In these localities the issue at stake is intra- rather than inter-community spatial contestations. Christophe Jaffrelot and Shazia Aziz Wülbers raise another important aspect about the legacy of Muslim-ruled princely states. They show that the centre of social life moved from the old city, but not its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the erstwhile princely elite have been replaced by an emerging middle class and new political elites. But this has not improved the situation of Muslims and both economically and politically the Muslim area has become “old” partly because of the old elite’s withdrawal into the shell of victimisation. Still the emerging Muslim elite is already reworking this old area. In the case of Hyderabad, Neena Ambre Rao and S. Abdul Thaha also bring to notice the persistent rhetoric of the ´´decaying old city´´ but locate this as part of the inner power struggle between the old and the new Muslim elites most evident in the political arena where Muslim political groups affiliated with the Congress party tries to use religious festivals for asserting identitarian and spatial claims, thus producing the rhetoric of the “old” Muslim area (p207). The crucial point that emerges is that these areas acquired their “Muslim” nature after the decline of Muslim princely state rule and under the influence of electoral politics based on demographic numbers and constituencies in post-colonial India. The final issue that emerges from the case studies of Muslims in Cuttack, Kozhikode and Bangalore is the increased contestation in hitherto peaceful histories of Muslims living in these cities. The marginalization of Muslims is exacerbated not just by the state but also by the vested interest of the Muslim elite in promoting partisan development trends that marginalize the lower castes and classes like the Qasais (butchers) in Cuttack. In contrast, Radhika Kanchana points that in Kozhikode due to economic opportunities and remittances from the Gulf countries, the Muslim community is moving from peripheral to a dominant position which is often treated with suspicion especially in the communally slanted rhetoric of a Muslim takeover. This was most evident in Kozhikode when accusations of a ´Love jehad ´ fuelled by rumours of Muslims taking over not just the city but also its Hindu women. Aminah Mohammad Arif studies the case of Shivaji Nagar. This Muslim area of Bangalore represents socially unique features where it is not prejudice of the state or another community but other non-religious factors shaped by considerations of caste, family connections, and class, that govern the movement of people into these areas and it is within these diverse logics that Shivaji Nagar turns into a Muslim area.

Beyond marginalization: politics of representation and contesting voices

Apart from delineating the diversity of local experiences, the volume provides some important general trends and prominent features of urban trajectories. It also incorporates new data and local statistics about education, employment and population figures supported by detailed maps. Like other investigations into the subject, it highlights the increasing marginalization of Muslims. However, it also maps and points at new developments, in particular the rise of a new middle class, religious and political actors and shifting historical trajectories and emerging trends both socially and politically within Muslim groups in different cities. However, the studies remain largely within the paradigm of the State and religious Community and do not incorporate other processes that mediate contemporary understanding of Muslim spaces and selfhood such as the issue of representation in media. To give one example, the politics of representation was most evident during the 2008 Batla House encounter coverage where Jamia Nagar was transformed from a university area into a violent, terrorist-harbouring Muslim ghetto. Similarly, Azamgrah has become Atankgarh (city of terrorism) due to the stereotype image-making media industry. It seems that the demarcation of a space as old, Muslim, backward and as a violent area is a complex but persistently everyday phenomenon in contemporary India. It occurs not just through institutionalized mechanisms of denial of development and politicized religious mobilizations and riots habitually employed by political and religious groups, but more critically through the deliberate invisibilization of the plurality of Muslim voices, cultures and spaces in mainstream public discourses. A vibrant Urdu and vernacular print and associational cultures do exist where marginalized Muslim counter-publics express their views as subjects and citizens. This is most evident not just in major cities studied in the volume, but also in small towns of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar often labelled as the ´´Muslim Belt´´. These small towns have not found much space in the book as well as remaining marginal to the existing historical and sociological studies of Muslims in India. Much of the scholarship has focussed on the history of sharif Muslims and the prospects of a rising Muslim middle class. However, ignoring large constituents of the Muslim community and their social existence and privileging the middle class, upper castes as agents of change may very well be counter-productive to the study of exclusion and marginalization of Indian Muslims. The Muslim community, just like the Muslim neighbourhood, is not a monolith but is fragmented by the identifications of caste groups, economic interest groups and sectarian affiliations. These fragmentations also suggest new trajectories of creativity in times of marginalization where the critique of the contemporary situation arises not just from the middle-class Muslim intelligentsia of the city, but also, to take a couple of exemplary figures, from religious affiliations of a scholar writing essays in a madrasa journal about the decline of Islamic tahzib in India or from the poetic expression of a poet at a qasbati mushaira lamenting the loss of secularism in public life. Such intellectual critiques are also evident in the emerging critique by pasmanda Muslims against the dominant Muslim elites. For a more complex understanding of diverse experiences of Muslims in Indian cities we must attempt to move beyond the singular narrative of decline. We needs to also highlight and engage with these other voices and efforts of claiming space as citizens, and not just as “Muslim” inhabitants and marginalized minority community of the land.