Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation

At more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms--while waves of communal violence have affected them over the last twenty-five years.

In India's cities, these developments find contrasting expressions. While Muslims are lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow).

These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping.

This book supplements an ethnographic approach to Muslims in eleven Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first-hand account of this untold story.


Author: Laurent Gayer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 02/21/2012
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.36lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780199327683

About the Author

Christophe Jaffrelot is Research Director at CNRS and teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po (Paris). From 2000-8, he was Director of CERI at Sciences Po. 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: Analysing and Fighting Caste, all of which are published by Hurst.

Laurent Gayer is a Research Fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), currently posted at the Centre de sciences humaines (CSH), Delhi. He is also Research Associate at the Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud, Paris.



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