Muslim Belonging In Secular India

Using the princely state of Hyderabad as a case study, Sherman surveys the experience of Muslim communities in postcolonial India.

The Present Volume Tries To Map The Tensions And Predicaments Of Indian Muslims Arising As A Result Of That Threat. The Papers Included Here Study The Ways In Which Hindu Right Forces Such As The Rss And The Bajrang Dal View The Muslims And In A Certain Sense Construct Them. Does The Rise Of Hindutva Necessarily Force The Muslims Towards Alienation Or Is There A Section, Which Looks At The Bjp Differently? How Does The Stress On Indian Pluralism Translate In Terms Of Muslims` Relationship With The State? What Has Been The Response Of The State To Such Demands?

After 1947, Muslims of India, acquired a different form, in terms of their role, status, problems, challenges and opportunities. The partition of the country divided them in two and later three parts and led their political, bureaucratic and intellectual elite to migrate to Pakistan. The expert opinion was divided about their very future. W.C. Smith, a renowned scholar of Islam, for instance, believed that Islam in India would emerge as more progressive, dynamic, liberal and creative than Pakistani Islam . The fact that Muslims in India bear the same proportion in Indian Population as those in the world bear to the world population, make their experience of universal value. Religion has two components. One is set of theological beliefs and practices. Two as a basis of a social identity. Even those who do not follow its beliefs and practices and are agnostics or atheists are an integral part of a religious community. This book is primarily a study of Muslim community since partition. But some references to pre-partition lessons and Islam, based on its acknowledged authorities, were inevitable for the study of contemporary problems of the community. This study of micro problems of Indian Muslims is a humble contributioin to the vastly grown scholarly work on macro Islam. About The Author: - Balraj Puri, started his public career in 1942 as editor of a Urdu weekly in Jammu. He has written over a thousand articles and authored or co-authored around forty books. Intercommunity relations and problems and potentialities of Muslims in India have been a matter of his special interest, as a social and political activist as also a writer. Apart from intervening in many conflict situation, he has been extensively writing on these subjects for national dailies and academic journals and addressed many academic gatherings. He has been interacting with Muslim scholars and leaders of the country belonging to various scholars of thought. He is vice-president of the Minority Council

`A sensitive and intelligent account of the Indian nationalist thought and the difficulties it faced in doing justice to India`s Islamic inheritance' - Lord Parekh Fellow of the British Academy `A thoughtful, well-researched and original analysis of the nationalist conceptualisation of the Muslim presence in India' - Professor Noel O`Sullivan , University of Hull Amalendu Misra shows that while some eminent nationalist leaders were implacably hostile to Muslims, even wholly secular ones were uneasy with India’s Muslim past and had a generally unfavourable disposition towards both Muslims and Islam. The book explicates this by focusing on the writings of Vivekananda, Gandhi, Nehru and Savarkar supported by a wealth of examples from a wide range of contexts. It argues that the views of these four prominent individuals were heavily shaped by British historiography as well as their respective visions of independent India. The author goes on to suggest how modern India needs to redefine itself to flourish as a genuinely secular democracy.

With reference to Gujarat.

During the turbulent period prior to colonial India’s partition and independence, Muslim intellectuals in Hyderabad sought to secularize and reformulate their linguistic, historical, religious, and literary traditions for the sake of a newly conceived national public. Responding to the model of secular education introduced to South Asia by the British, Indian academics launched a spirited debate about the reform of Islamic education, the importance of education in the spoken languages of the country, the shape of Urdu and its past, and the significance of the histories of Islam and India for their present. The Language of Secular Islam pursues an alternative account of the political disagreements between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, conflicts too often described as the product of primordial and unchanging attachments to religion. The author suggests that the political struggles of India in the 1930s, the very decade in which the demand for Pakistan began to be articulated, should not be understood as the product of an inadequate or incomplete secularism, but as the clashing of competing secular agendas. Her work explores negotiations over language, education, and religion at Osmania University, the first university in India to use a modern Indian language (Urdu) as its medium of instruction, and sheds light on questions of colonial displacement and national belonging. Grounded in close attention to historical evidence, The Language of Secular Islam has broad ramifications for some of the most difficult issues currently debated in the humanities and social sciences: the significance and legacies of European colonialism, the inclusions and exclusions enacted by nationalist projects, the place of minorities in the forging of nationalism, and the relationship between religion and modern politics. It will be of interest to historians of colonial India, scholars of Islam, and anyone who follows the politics of Urdu.

This is the fourth publication originating from the conference Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Past, Present and Future, which was organised in June 2013 by the Institute of Graduate Studies and Research (IGSR), Anton de Kom University of Suriname. The core of the book is based on a conference panel which focused specifically on the experience of Muslim with indentured migrants and their descendants. This is a significant contribution since the focus of most studies on Indian indenture has been almost exclusively on Hindu religion and culture, even though an estimated seventeen percent of migrants were Muslims. This book thus fills an important gap in the indentured historiography, both to understand that past as well as to make sense of the present, when Muslim identities are undergoing rapid changes in response to both local and global realities. The book includes a chapter on the experiences of Muslim indentured immigrants of Indonesian descent who settled in Suriname. The core questions in the study are as follows: What role did Islam play in the lives of (Indian) Muslim migrants in their new settings during indenture and in the post-indenture period? How did Islam help migrants adapt and acculturate to their new environment? What have been the similarities and differences in practices, traditions and beliefs between Muslim communities in the different countries and between them and the country of origin? How have Islamic practices and Muslim identities transformed over time? What role does Islam play in the Muslims’ lives in these countries in the contemporary period? In order to respond to these questions, this book examines the historic place of Islam in migrants’ place of origin and provides a series of case studies that focus on the various countries to which the indentured Indians migrated, such as Mauritius, South Africa, Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname and Fiji, to understand the institutionalisation of Islam in these settings and the actual lived experience of Muslims which is culturally and historically specific, bound by the circumstances of individuals’ location in time and space. The chapters in this volume also provide a snapshot of the diversity and similarity of lived Muslim experiences.