
Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India
Kalyani Devaki Menon(Author)
Cornell University Press
Published on 15. May 2022
Book
Hardback
216 pages
978-1-5017-6058-7 (ISBN)
Description
Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India.
Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.
Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.
Reviews / Votes
This volume by Menon is a timely exploration of the dynamics of place-creation in modern India.(Choice) Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India is a valuable document that seriously takes issue with the lives of the people in question.
(International Journal of Asian Studies) Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India by Kalyani Devaki Menon is a remarkable work of research on place-making practices of Muslims amid the exclusionary nationalism of revanchist Hindu Right. This book is a compelling exposition of the narratives of an excluded religious minority and their varied efforts to make place.
(Pacific Affairs) This book is an outstanding anthropological study of Indian Muslims who navigate their identity and space in a country where they have been historically alienated, stereotyped, ousted, and vilified.
(Religious Studies Review)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
13 b&w halftones, 2 maps - 13 Halftones, black and white - 2 Maps
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
907 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5017-6058-7 (9781501760587)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Kalyani Devaki Menon
Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India
E-Book
05/2022
Cornell University Press
€24.49
Available for download
Person
Kalyani Devaki Menon is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. She is the author of Everyday Nationalism.
Content
Introduction
Part 1: Landscapes of Inequality
1. A Place for Muslims
2. Gender and Precarity
Part 2: Making Place
3. Perfecting the Self
4. Living with Difference
5. Life after Death
Conclusion
Part 1: Landscapes of Inequality
1. A Place for Muslims
2. Gender and Precarity
Part 2: Making Place
3. Perfecting the Self
4. Living with Difference
5. Life after Death
Conclusion