Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2022. xiii, 196 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper; US$19.00, ebook. ISBN 9781501760617.
Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India by Kalyani Devaki Menon is a remarkable work of research on place-making practices of Muslims amid the exclusionary nationalism of revanchist Hindu Right. Placemaking in the realm of religion is explored to challenge existing hegemonies and exclusionary tendencies of contemporary India. Menon, an anthropologist of religion, focuses on how Muslim residents of Old Delhi negotiate their identity. The author is careful with the usage of the term “Muslim” and acknowledges its diversity: Sunnis, Shias, Sufis and atheists, Barelvis and Deobandis, Ahl-e-Hadis Muslims as well as those who refuse to identify with a maslak (path). Here emphasis is on historical circumstances which enable solidarities. The nostalgia of Ganga-Jamni culture of Shahjahanabad goes beyond memories, forging cultural commons in the present. These traditions form an articulation of their identity as Indian Muslims.
Menon goes beyond spatial analysis to reveal how individuals make place through everyday acts. There is great emphasis on narratives in the act of placemaking. The author details stories of martyrs and Jinns that Old Delhi people believe in, riots, CAA protests, and the ways in which these influence placemaking. In the current sociopolitical context where exclusion of Muslims is widespread, this book attempts to bring to fore the mundane efforts of Muslims to create a place for themselves. Instead of adopting a macro perspective on Muslim identity assertion in economic and political spheres, it employs a micro perspective to offer a nuanced account of Muslim residents in a particular area. It takes up aspects of narratives, religious practices, rituals, and women’s labour to discuss placemaking. While these contours suffice for an ethnographic account, they are only the tip of the iceberg in understanding the pan-India Muslim situation.
This research is contextualized in the backdrop of the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, violence in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in 2014, beef-related lynching, the surge in anti-Muslim violence, communal rhetoric, the Citizenship Amendment Act, etc., and how Muslims make a place for themselves in this scenario. The book harps on the differential citizenship that Muslims experience. For example, the author highlights how upper caste Hindus are seen as the normative national subject, while Indian Muslims are constructed as an exception. Drawing inference on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s idea of homo sacer i.e., the one who may not be sacrificed, yet may be murdered with impunity. Challenging this differential citizenship and existing hegemonies, Muslims build cultural commons within Old Delhi. Through ritualism and public displays of identity they produce a place for themselves and assert belonging in face of exclusion.
Written over a period of 10 years, the book is comprehensive and coherent and highlights the challenges and negotiations anthropologists face while doing fieldwork. It consists of five chapters and several photographs, testimonies which make this ethnography rich. The book is made accessible to a wider audience with the usage of common Hindi and Urdu words. The author vividly describes the ease and challenges of her own identity as a Hindu researcher based in the United States conducting research on Muslims, as well as the complexities of being a female researcher.
Part 1 of the book elaborates on “Landscapes of Inequality,” highlighting prejudices of Muslim neighbourhoods, such as visible markers of identity like veiling, and the increasing economic insecurity Muslims face. While both men and women negotiate precarity, the focus is on the labour of Muslim women—how they use their skills and engage in different forms of work. The lives of women cannot be solely understood through the lens of religion but how religious identity intersects with other identities: women, labourer, artisans, etc.
Part 2, “Making Place,” discusses the multiple ways Muslims make place, including how members of Muslim Club insist on returning to religious texts and practices of the Prophet. And how Shia’s of Old Delhi make place for Muslims in India through religious practices, forging common cultures, building community, and unsettling religious sectarian boundaries. Religious narratives and mourning practices also allow for construction of alternative communities. While some forge transnational communities with co-religionists there are others who articulate belonging with other Indian Muslims, inflicted by a long history of living in a community with Hindus in India.
The author examines constructions of Muslim subjectivity in the context of Islamophobia faced by Muslims across the globe to emphasize transnational Islamic cultures. It is crucial to locate the self-understandings of Muslims not just in relation to religious ideas and debates among Islamic movements, but also in terms of discourses of modernity, gender, class, and nation.
This book argues that despite securitization discourses, Islamophobia, and violence that have secured Muslims in places like Old Delhi, and economic forces capitalize on the politics of religion, class, and caste—people continue to build community in the face of marginalization. Some emphasize difference, while others articulate transnational religious communities, and others narrate religious histories and cultures. Still “others engage in rituals of belonging that resist understandings of religious identity as mutually exclusive, rooting people in place against the tide of Hindu chauvinism and exclusionary understanding of nation” (161). These efforts are acts of placemaking for Muslims in India.
While we cannot ignore situatedness and the particularities of ethnography and diversity and intragroup tensions of Muslim communities across India, the novelty of this book should not be underestimated. It has coherently woven in references from feminist anthropological texts, politics of religion—including arguments from Indian as well as Western scholars—making it a brilliant read on Muslim issues today. This book is a compelling exposition of the narratives of an excluded religious minority and their varied efforts to make place.
Sabah Khan
University College London, London