Small linguistic tricks can have big footprints. This book examines how India's current Hindu nationalist government uses language as a weapon against its Muslim citizens. Each chapter provides a discursive history of matters that have been a source of conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India, highlighting the potent relationship between language and politics. The book explores four issues, Ramajanmbhoomi temple, Muslim Personal Law as it pertains to Indian Muslim women, Kashmir and re...

Being Janana focuses on same-sex desiring male-bodied subjects in Lucknow, India, and explores how they make meaning in the marginalization of their desire through language performativity.Along with their desire for other men, jananas maintain ostensibly heteronormatively and culturally defined masculine positions. This book argues for an intersectional approach to understanding janana life worlds and situates janana subjectivity in dialogue with...

Now updated: An "eminently readable, highly engaging" anthology about the lives of ordinary citizens in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (Margaret Mills, Ohio State University).For the second edition of this popular textbook, readings have been updated and new essays added. The result is a timely collection that explores key themes in understanding the region, including gender, caste, class, religion, globalization, economic liberalization, national...

Insightful field research into the complexity of women's roles in a subset of Islamic culture.Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton grounds her firsthand research into India's Sufi shr...

Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age examines the construction of a Sikh national identity in post-colonial India and the diaspora and explores the reasons for the failure of the movement for an independent Sikh state: Khalistan. Based on a decade of research, it is argued that the failure of the movement to bring about a sovereign, Sikh state should not be interpreted as resulting from the weakness of the ‘communal’ ties which bind members of the Sikh ‘nation’ t...

Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults on its pluralistic values? India's stunning linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity has been supported since Independence by a political structure that emphasizes equal rights for all, and protects liberties of religion and speech. But a decent Constitution does not implement itself, an...

The rioting in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, in 1961 was a watershed event for India. After the Partition, it was the first time such large-scale communal violence had taken place. The author, Prateep K. Lahiri, on his first posting, was involved in bringing the situation under control. Some time later in 1969, as district magistrate of Indore, Lahiri played a key role in dealing with the outbreak of communal violence in that city. While the violence in both instances appeared to have been spo...

India has taken so sharp a turn in recent years that the very centre has shifted considerably. What led to this swing? Is it possible to trace the path to this point? Is there a way back to the just, secular, inclusive vision of our Constitution-makers?This country has long been an outlier in its South Asian neighbourhood, with its inclusive Constitution and functioning democracy. The growth of Hindutva, in some sense, brings India in line with the other polities here. In Our H...

This book studies the engagement of various Muslim communities with Bihar politics from colonial times to present-day India. It debunks several myths in highlighting Muslim resistance to the Two-Nation theory, and counters the ‘Isolation Syndrome’ faced by Muslim communities after Independence. Using rare archival sources and hitherto unexamined Urdu texts, this book offers a nuanced exploration of complex themes such as the struggle against Bengali hegemony, communalism, regionalism and a...

The birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and the land that produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, Gujarat has been at the centre-stage of South Asia’s political iconography for more than a century. As Gujarat, created as a separate state in 1960, celebrates its golden jubilee this collection of essays critically explores the many paradoxes and complexities of modernity and politics in the state. The contributors provide much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity fo...

Fascinating in its combination of personal stories and analytical insights, Some Trouble with Cows will help students of conflict understand how a seemingly irrational and archaic riot becomes a means for renegotiating the distribution of power and rights in a small community.Using first-person accounts of Hindus and Muslims in a remote Bangladeshi village, Beth Roy evocatively describes and analyzes a large-scale riot that profoundly altered life in the area in the 1950s....

Over the years, politicians across the world have exploited ethnic and religious sentiments to mobilize support in their favour. Majoritarian communalism entails rehashing historical grievances and creating fear among the majority that minorities threaten the former's religion, culture or tradition. In many instances, the minority groups are described as privileged, unduly supported by the state, a threat to economic and job opportunities for the majority and so on.South Asia-home ...