Hindu-Muslim Research Articles

‘Bound hand and foot and handed over to the caste Hindus’: Ambedkar, untouchability and the politics of Partition

This article examines B. R. Ambedkar’s dramatically shifting politics in the years prior to Partition. In 1940, he supported the creation of Pakistan. In 1946, he joined Winston Churchill in his demands to delay independence. Yet, in 1947, Ambedkar rejected Pakistan and joined the Nehru administration. Traditional narratives explain these changes as part of Ambedkar’s political pragmatism. It is believed that such pragmatism, along with Gandhi’s good faith, helped Ambedkar to secure a place in Nehru’s Cabinet. In contrast, I argue that Ambedkar changed his attitude towards Congress due to the political transformations elicited by Partition. Ambedkar approached Congress as a last resort to maintain a political space for Dalits in independent India. This, however, was unsuccessful. Partition not only saw the birth of two countries but also virtually eliminated the histories of resistance of political minorities that did not fall under the Hindu–Muslim binary, such as Dalits. In the case of Ambedkar, his past as a critic of Gandhi and Congress was erased in favour of the more palatable image of him as the father of the constitution. This essay reconfigures our understanding of Partition by showing how the promise of Pakistan shaped the way we remember Ambedkar.

Triumph of the Rajput: Sanjay Leela Bhansali and the fascist aesthetics of Padmaavat

Abstract Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat (2018) re-tells the legendary tale of the Rajput queen Padmavati. In recounting this tale, Bhansali hews to the historic, Manichaean dichotomization of Hindu and Muslim, presenting Rajputs as entirely noble figures and Muslim invaders as essentially barbaric. Employing Susan Sontag’s and Frank Tomasulo’s theorizations of the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, this article examines how Bhansali glorifies the Rajputs’ purported history via his fascist aesthetics. Such an approach rearticulates history as myth and presents it as a form of theatre. This article analyses Bhansali’s use of such aesthetics to reenact the Manichaean framing of Hindu–Muslim relations, which reaffirm contemporary chauvinistic formulations of the (Hindu) nation. In the process, Bhansali’s film can be seen as lending support to the ideology of contemporary fundamentalist Hindu forces.

Writing against culture: unveiling education and modernity for Hindu Indian and Muslim Pakistani women through an ‘ethnography of the particular’

In this article, we analyze our experiences engaging in a collaborative ethnographic project. This project brings together two ethnographic studies undertaken independently from the other in Gujarat, India and Punjab, Pakistan. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Hindu women in India with those of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan to depict globalization as a simultaneously interconnected and disjointed project. Our effort is to disrupt the linear telling of the production of global and universal modernity through education, which is often seen through rejecting local culture. We take a critical, feminist, postcolonial approach to challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge and incorporate the scholarship and perspectives of non-Western scholars, problematizing the traditional self–other distinction. This article outlines the methodological process and journey that we undertook to create a dialog between our independent ethnographic work focusing on India and Pakistan.

Islamic cosmopolitanism out of Muslim Asia: Hindu–Muslim business co-operation between Odessa and Yiwu

ABSTRACTThis article explores the forms of cosmopolitanism that form an important element of the identities and activities of long-distance Muslim merchants involved in the global trade in Chinese commodities. It focuses on two nodes that are central for this type of trade: Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province. Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the commercial and social ties that exist between Muslim traders from Afghanistan and those who identify with the country’s dispersed Hindu ethno-religious minority. It argues that the ability to manage heterogeneous social and religious relationships is of critical significance to the activities and identities of these commodity traders.

Mapping the self: challenges of insider research in a riot-affected city and strategies to improve data quality

Ethnic riots in India rarely lead to convictions of perpetrators and redress for victims. By implication, antagonisms prevail years after violence has ceased and victims often find themselves sharing everyday spaces with their attackers. The task of identifying the risk factors leading to ethnic violence as well as the nuances of coexistence for individuals ridden with memories of violence and prejudice is rife with methodological and ethical challenges. Concerns surrounding data quality are enhanced when the researcher is also an insider. In a study spanning 26 months (undertaken between 2010 and 2015), I examine the challenges of an insider researcher in the context of Hindu–Muslim violence that occurred in Gujarat in 2002, and offer techniques to improve data quality. Strategies include the cross-verification of sources within official data; interviewing respondents in group and individual settings to address the attitudinal fallacy; and employing respondent-empowered cognitive maps. I argue that visual data, such as cognitive maps, enable a better understanding of abstract social concepts and also facilitate a balance between distance and involvement for the insider researcher.

Segregation, Polarization, and Ethnic Conflict

An index of ethnic segregation conveys the extent of spatial mixing of ethnic groups, whereas an index of ethnic polarization and similar diversity measures show the overall balance between the groups. We present a game-theoretic model of conflict in which local success of one ethnic group encourages attacks by its co-ethnics in neighboring areas. Conditional on conflict breaking out, we find that for highly ethnically polarized societies, increasing ethnic segregation decreases the incidence and intensity of conflict. In contrast, in societies with low ethnic polarization, increasing segregation increases conflict. This is because segregation and polarization jointly determine the spread of conflict, an important channel that has been neglected previously. We find strong empirical support for model predictions in two very different conflicts: Hindu–Muslim riots in the 1980s and 1990s in India and the Bosnian Civil War from 1992 to 1995.

HINDU-MUSLIM FERTILITY DIFFERENTIAL IN INDIA: A COHORT APPROACH.

Hindus and Muslims together account for 94% of the population of India. The fertility differential between these two religious groups is a sensitive and hotly debated issue in political and academic circles. However, the debate is mostly based on a period approach to fertility change, and there have been some problems with the reliability of period fertility data. This study investigated cohort fertility patterns among Hindus and Muslims and the causes of the relatively higher level of fertility among Muslims. Data from the three National Family Health Surveys conducted in India since the early 1990s were analysed using a six-parameter special form of the Gompertz model and multiple linear regression models. The results show a gap of more than 1.3 children per woman between those Muslim and Hindu women who ended/will end their reproductive period in the calendar years 1993 to 2025. The socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of Muslims explain 31.2% of the gap in fertility between Muslims and Hindus, while the desire for more children among Muslims explains an additional 18.2% of the gap in fertility.

Intimate Transgressions and Communalist Narratives: Inter-religious romance in a divided Gujarat

AbstractIn this article, I examine the seeming paradox of Hindu–Muslim romantic affairs in the wider context of communalism in Gujarat in the wake of the 2002 anti-Muslim violence. At the outset, such affairs appear to embody the most extreme form of taboo, both in their defiance of conventional arranged marriage systems (where caste endogamy and shared religious affiliation play a paramount role) as well as in the wider socio-political context in which Hindus and Muslims are viewed as irreconcilable enemies, or at least oppositional in lifestyle, beliefs, and values. Yet, while media reports in recent years have highlighted similar cases of transgressive liaisons elsewhere in India which have been met with extreme violence, the couplings which I describe in this article, are in practice tolerated by kin and neighbours as an ‘open secret’ which, while public knowledge, has not incurred strong retribution. While love has often been presented as a force for emancipation from the constraints of social conventions and norms in the popular media, I argue that this ‘toleration’ of inter-religious liaisons in the cases I describe suggests the very opposite: namely, that they do not present a significant challenge to entrenched social divisions at the local level.

Historical Film and Hindu–Muslim Relations in Post-Hindutva India: The Case of Jodhaa Akbar

Ashutosh Gowariker's Bollywood historical Jodhaa Akbar (2008) is a story of love and marriage between the great Mughal Emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605), one of the most famous and reli...

Assessing Hindu–Muslim Fertility Differentials in West Bengal

Religion, class–caste factors, and sociocultural norms influence fertility rates, largely determining reproductive behavior. Hindu–Muslim fertility differentials in West Bengal, India, are examined through characteristics and interaction hypotheses tests using National Family Health Survey-3 data. Results reveal most Hindu women have at least two births while Muslim women are likely to have at least four births, before avoiding subsequent births. Multiple classification analysis implies prevalent socioeconomic characteristics cause this fertility differential. Fertility differences are also noticed between lesser- and better-educated women groups, implying a strong religion–women education level interaction effect. The same holds true for the religion–son preference interaction effect as well.

Religion, poverty and conflict in a garbage slum of Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad is often called an Indian ‘success story’ in terms of economic urbanization, but it is also a city highly segregated along religious and caste lines, and a flashpoint in the 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots that left thousands dead. Most of the Muslim communities relocated after the violence work in a vast informal sector around the city’s landfills and waste management peripheries that are disregarded by local government and endemic with corruption. While many scholars see this as a recipe for violent conflict, we explore the garbage slum community in Chandola to show that a leveling of social stratification and reduction of segregation amongst Hindu and Muslim communities in this slum results in a more congruous inter-group relationship than current literatures on the relationship between poverty, religion and violence might predict. However, their unity has come at the expense of jointly ‘othering’ an even more vulnerable group of newcomers – a Bangladeshi migrant community that is persecuted both by the state as well as by fellow residents. We show that while violence markers are constituted in new ways, challenging some assumptions of how inter-group violence is triggered, the fundamental societal weaknesses that facilitate such tensions remain prevalent despite changing conflict actor allegiances.

The Wandering Fakirs of Bengal

The historiography of the Fakir rebellion has drawn much attention since Ghosh in 1930 depicted the Fakirs as raiders from outside Bengal. In independent India, two groups of ideology-driven historians, Marxists and Secularists, expounded the uprising as an early peasant rebellion and a shining example of Hindu–Muslim campaign against the Raj. This article explodes both scholarly myths, since its archival research reconfirms that the Fakirs were increasingly aggressive plunderers in religious garb, tormenting the Bengal countryside. Mainly based on colonial records, later parts of this article illustrate how and why the British felt increasingly compelled to curtail Fakir movements and activities.

Ban of <i>jatka</i> (Juvenile Hilsa Fish) Catching: Views and Coping Options of Artisanal Fishers in Coastal Bangladesh

This paper examines adverse effects at lives and livelihoods of traditional Hindu fishermen and Muslim fishermen due to periodical restriction on jatka (juvenile hilsa fish) catching in coastal Bangladesh. A total of 100 respondents from both religious groups were purposively selected from four study sites. Traditionally, the Jaladas (slave of the water) were engaged in the fishing profession who belonging to the Hinduism and one of low caste-bound people. They are being put under pressure by incoming Muslims who take up fishing as their profession. This study finds that though Hindu fishermen seriously face dimensions of abject poverty but majority of them follow government rule where Muslim fishers don’t care. In coping strategies, majority of Hindu fishermen have psycho-social barrier to change fishing profession. Their coping options are also limited than Muslim fishermen. This paper suggests that policy instruments and fishery management of Bangladesh should give special focus on socio-economic & cultural aspects of those downtrodden people for inclusive development.

Socio Religio Culture During Qutb Shahs

The Qutb Shahi dynasty has been considered a “Composite “ of Hindu Muslim religio- social culture.

Spatial Segregation, Real Estate Markets and the Political Economy of Corruption in Lucknow, India

A number of scholars have argued that discrimination against Muslims in India’s urban housing markets stems from long histories of Hindu–Muslim ‘communal’ violence, and that the resulting antagonism and discrimination against Muslim tenants and homebuyers leads to their permanent ‘ghettoization’. In such accounts, the state is portrayed as absent and unable to provide ethnic minorities with a sense of security, so that disenfranchised Muslims seek out the ‘safety in numbers’ of segregated and often traditional neighbourhoods, even when urban housing markets provide updated and modern accommodation elsewhere. Based on official property registration data and ethnographic fieldwork in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, I complicate this narrative, focusing on the productive practices of networking and collusion that enable a veritable building boom in ‘traditional’ Muslim neighbourhoods. The article shows that proximity to bureaucrats, the relative electoral strength of Muslims, and the existence of waqf property result in lower expenses for corruption and thus higher profit margins for Muslim developers in traditional Muslim areas. Irrespective of discrimination elsewhere, this arguably creates positive incentives for Muslims to stay put, and thus demonstrates that their continued segregation does not necessarily indicate blanket disenfranchisement—but rather a differential incorporation in the political economy of collusion.

India -- Pakistan Relations

It is unfortunate that in spite of India’s best efforts the relations between the two neighboring countries have remained far from satisfactory. Indo-Pak hostility is the outcome of political, cultural, social and economic factors deeply rooted in history, partition of India, division of assets and liabilities, demarcation of boundaries of both, the land, the water, communal riots, Hindu Muslim Sikh Hostility, large scale migration from both sides, Pakistan support to terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir, Nuclear programme of Pakistan and influx of latest generation sophisticated arms into Pakistan, Siachin Glacier. Pakistan’s growing linkages with fundamentalist elements, trans-border smuggling of weapons and drugs, determination of maritime boundary, discriminatory trade barriers against India, and the treatment meted out to the minorities in Pakistan are the major irritants in the relations between the two countries.

Islamophobia and Anti‐Semitism: Shared Prejudice or Singular Social Pathologies

Islamophobia and Anti‐Semitism: Shared Prejudice or Singular Social Pathologies Michael Dobkowski There is no doubt: there has been a significant rise in anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia in recent years. Both have deep roots in history as well as being generated by more recent political and economic influences. Some see them as basically parallel phenomena, characterized more by their similarities than their differences. Others believe that anti‐Semitism is a unique prejudice that really stands alone and cannot be compared to Islamophobia or even racism. What I will attempt to do in this essay is to provide a theoretical and historical framework for approaching this complex and controversial question. I don't expect my analysis will satisfy everyone, but I do hope it will generate additional thinking on these impactful “hatreds.” The roots of Islamophobia Let me briefly begin with some context. Islamophobia is a term first put into use in 1997 in a report of the Runnymede Trust, a think tank in Britain launched by the British Home Secretary Jack Straw. It was given further currency by the 2001 UN conference on racism at Durban that most observers believe devolved from an examination of racism to an exercise in racism and anti‐Semitism. Israel was singled out for special criticism prompting the U.S. delegates to walk out. The official declarations eventually included a reference to anti‐Semitism, but this was counterbalanced by the addition of Islamophobia suggesting an equivalency between the two phenomena. Clearly, Muslim populations around the world are experiencing a hostile pressure and waves of discrimination that come from non‐Muslim populations of various sorts—the product of Hindu–Muslim tensions in India, of Christian–Muslim competition in Africa, of Jewish–Arab disputes in Israel and Palestine, and of anti‐Muslim immigrant sentiment in Europe and North America. There have been countless incidents of stereotyping, scapegoating, and bigotry directed against Muslims because of their religious identity. There exists a huge and profound ignorance about Islam. There is no shortage of voices proclaiming that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic tradition, that horrific violence against enemies of Islam and people defined as infidels have deep Qur'anic roots (Yoffie , 121). Many believe and are spreading the image that Islam is the enemy of the West, America, and Israel and that it is a religion prone to violence and terrorism. This tendency is certainly fueled by a long tradition of anti‐Muslim discourse in Western history and culture—from Dante to Don Quixote, to basic Orientalist scholarship; it has been exacerbated by ignorance, bigotry, and post‐9/11 fears. Islamophobia is real and to a certain extent is ingrained in Western culture. In his Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrated that the West's reified view of Islam has its roots in European colonialism. In his Covering Islam, he showed how these colonial notions continue to influence Western coverage of the Middle East in the 1990s. Islamophobia needs to be examined and confronted. It results from ignorance and from limited social contact, which is in turn buttressed by conflict and violence occurring around the world and its treatment by mainstream culture. This anxiety, like most prejudices, relies on a sense of otherness (Mattson , 129–130). Similarly, anti‐Semitism remains a persistent prejudice. The murder of Jewish shoppers at the Parisian Hyper Casher supermarket on January 9, 2015, after the killing of twelve people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, was particularly disturbing, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a troubling pattern. By every measure, there has been a rise of anti‐Semitism around the world—incidents of violence and intimidation, negative polling data, incitement, desecrations, rhetoric, etc. In 2006, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Paris. In 2012, Mehdi Nemmouche killed four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse by Mohammad Merah. In early February 2015, there were killings in Copenhagen, and 300 Jewish graves were desecrated in Eastern France. Additionally, there were smaller affronts like the popularity of the quenelle gesture (a reverse Nazi salute...

Hindu–Muslim Relations in the Work of Rabindranath Tagore and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) are two stalwarts of twentieth century Bengali literature. Born and raised in very different socio-cultural and religious environments, both lacked formal education, yet both went on to become ardent champions of education. Despite their different religious identities, both writers stepped out of their cultural and gendered borders to embrace the ‘other’ in a spirit of fellowship and unity, against a backdrop of turbulent Hindu–Muslim relationships and recurrent communal riots, throughout most of their adult lives. The present article investigates this cross-cultural, dialogic-inclusive vision of Hindu–Muslim unity as reflected in the literary works of these two writers. It seeks to explain why and how they espoused such a bold vision, going against the grain of religious feuds that characterised the history of the period. The current relevance of such cross-cultural navigation is evident.

An Idiom for India

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers, consequently, understand each other most of the time, but not all of the time, though they can never read each other's texts. Their shared space, Hindustani, finds no official recognition in India or in Pakistan, but it denotes, particularly in the early twentieth century, an aspiration for Hindu–Muslim unity: the dream of a shared, syncretic culture, crafted from the speech genres of everyday life. Beginning with the colonial project of Hindustani, the essay focuses on a discussion of the works of early twentieth-century writers like Nehru, Premchand and Sa'adat Hasan Manto. I argue that the aesthetic project of Hindustani attempted to produce, not a common language, but a common idiom: a set of shared conventions, phrases and forms of address, which would be legible to Indians from all religions and all regions. By theorizing Hindustani as an idiom, and not a language, I explain its persistence in Bollywood cinema well after its abandonment in all literary and official registers. Bollywood, I argue, is Hindustani cinema, not only because of its use of a mixed Hindi–Urdu language in its dialogues, but also because of its development of a set of clearly recognizable, easily repeatable conventions that can surmount linguistic differences.

The Enclave, The Citadel and the Ghetto: The Threefold Segregation of Upper‐Class Muslims in India

AbstractThe urban sociology literature has identified three types of segregated spaces: the ghetto, the enclave and the citadel. While the ghetto stems from a high constraint, the enclave accounts for a more intentional form of segregation and the citadel refers to a deliberate attempt to exclude undesirable populations. While these three figures are often contrasted in the American literature, this article focuses on a specific type of neighbourhood that combines all of these: the upper‐class minority neighbourhood. By introducing the main results of an interview study I conducted in the Indian city of Aligarh, I show that Muslim upper‐class residential choices are informed by contradictory feelings: while the threat of Hindu–Muslim riots forces them to segregate in homogenous neighbourhoods (the ghetto), their segregation also stems from a genuine desire to live in an Islamic environment (the enclave). Finally, the Muslim upper classes also indulge in a sharp process of socio‐spatial differentiation from their poorer coreligionists (the citadel). These processes of compelled segregation, self‐aggregation and social distancing lead to an enduring spatial concentration along religious and class lines. The simultaneity of these three logics indicates that the categories of the ghetto, the enclave and the citadel, framed in reference to the American context, can be applied to the Indian city of Aligarh if understood as dynamic processes rather than static spatial units. Such a reformulation allows theory to travel across the North–South divide in a more productive way.