A minority's agency: class, confession, and the quandaries of Muslim India, 1947-c. 1977

Thesis

This thesis sets out to recover the agency of a wide range of Indian Muslim actors—elite and subaltern, secular and clerical, activist and apolitical—to illuminate the history of the world’s largest religious minority. Bringing the unity of the Muslim experience of postcolonial India from 1947 to c. 1977 under a single focus, it both generalises about the Indian Muslim condition and comments more broadly on the character of Indian democracy. The six chapters here tell of another India, as it were, one quite at variance with the exnominated account of the ‘world’s largest democracy’. Despite its best intentions, the Congress regime that ruled uninterruptedly through the period under study here appears, by turns, illiberal, intolerant, and undemocratic. Minority rights were at a discount. India’s Muslims, I document, had to contend with discrimination in the services, an electoral system that deprived them of commensurate representation, riots in which they accounted for most of the fatalities, a securitisation regime in the borderlands that dispossessed and disenfranchised them, and, a fortiori, an unresponsive leadership. Indeed, what I have called an ‘ashraf betrayal’ is the Ariadne’s thread running through the thesis. Steering between the Scylla of Islamophobia and the Charybdis of capitulation, the Muslim political elite plumped for depoliticisation and juridification. Muslim politics came to be identified with a set of elite symbols—the hajj subsidy, Urdu, Aligarh Muslim University, Muslim personal law, wasiqadari pensions, waqf income—that had little bearing on the lives of ordinary Muslims, shaped by discrimination, disadvantage, and deindustrialisation. There was no room for trade unions, mass protests, anti-discrimination legislation, and subaltern solidarity in this version of Muslim politics. The corollary was a jurisprudential habit of mind, the singular investment in two holy books, the Quran and the Constitution. ‘Muslim politics’ in postcolonial India, I conclude, has been a politics manqué.

Authors: Anil, P

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: India; Islam; secularism; Nehru
• Subjects: Political Science; History; Social history; Cultural history