Panel Organizers:

Dr. Yasmin Khan - University of Edinburgh, UK
Prof. Roger Jeffery - University of Edinburgh, UK

Abstract

This panel is concerned with questions about everyday lives in South Asia, and the ways in which questions framed by elites about religion and secularism, often play out quite differently at the local level. It will deal with two major questions:

Firstly, the everyday life of South Asian Muslims. Much discussion of Islam in South Asia concentrates on political and ideological issues, whereas accounts of everyday life tend to be confined to the study of members of other religious communities. In this panel we will welcome ethnographic and historical work that focuses on studies of the daily lives of Muslim South Asians in relation to such topics as responses to religious reform movements, the State, political mobilisation and the impact of globalising media and consumption.

Secondly, the everyday life of South Asians and the secular state. There has been extensive focus on communalism in South Asia but less attention paid to experiences of secularism. Religion is often objectified and put under scrutiny whereas secularism escapes analysis. We are interested in analyzing whether the state has been able to reproduce ideas of secularism, both in the contemporary setting and historically. The papers will explore how far everyday lives have been affected by interaction with state policies, changes in political leadership, legal initiatives and by secular ideas and practices.

  Radhika Govinda, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Secularism and its discontents through a feminist lens: women's activism in North India
 
"Didi, are you Hindu?" (1) I was asked when I first met a mixed group of adolescent Hindu and Muslim girls that a women's organization has mobilized in a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh in North India. When I replied that I didn't subscribe to any particular faith, and that such things held little importance for me, they were quick to observe, "Yeah...there was another didi who had come to visit us from Lucknow and she said the same thing as you. But she was Muslim." I have wondered since that meeting if flaunting the lack of subscription to or practice of a faith is not perhaps the privilege of middle,class, urban,educated elite in India. T.N. Madan is, in fact, extremely critical of just such an elite whom he calls ‘the secularist minority' (2). For him, attempts by the secularist minority ‘to stigmatize the majority as primordially oriented and to preach secularism to the latter as the law of human existence is moral arrogance and worse...' While scholar,activists like Flavia Agnes consider that women's movement in India is not sufficiently grounded in a ‘secular' framework (3), Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana think that the principle itself is unsound for the movement (4). The latter claim that secularism is a universalistic concept, much like ‘sisterhood', subsuming particular identities of caste and religion, and, thus, needs to be questioned.
 
By attempting to probe deeper into the apparently unproblematic relationship the Hindu and Muslim adolescent girls I met shared with each other, this paper proposes to examine the contradictions that emerge in the discourse and practice of secularism by those involved in empowering women in their everyday lives in India. The paper first explores the tensions within women's organizations among different activists and their perspectives, and between organizations' internal structure and policies and secular principles to which their organizations claim allegiance. It then examines the ways in which the interpretation of the activists and of the women they interact with in the field varies in terms of the concept and practice of secularism, highlighting the challenge they pose to the women's movement as such. In addressing these concerns, the paper unpacks the politics of positionality and representation of those involved in women's activism in relation to Indian secularism. The paper draws on observations made during interactions with activists and scholars working with women in rural and urban areas of Uttar Pradesh. Theoretically, it examines the arguments of different feminists vis,à,vis secularism in the context of arguments offered by well,known critics of the concept.
 
Markus Daechsel, University of Edinburgh, School of History and Classics
Edinburgh, UK
Marketing Indifference: constructions of the religious 'other' in commercial Urdu children and youth literature
 
This paper is about how commercial children and youth literature between 1900 and 1950 struggled to meet two contradictory market trends: on the one hand it had to appeal to young people of all Urdu,reading religious communities (which in the Punjab and to a lesser extent also elsewhere in South Asia included not only Muslims, but also Hindus, Sikhs and Christians) in order to be commercially viable; on the other hand it was directly tied up with discourses of education that attached a premium to the inculcation of religious and cultural authenticity. Both 'secularism' and 'communalism' were thus directly and contradictorily linked to commercial success. Literary producers often responded to this dilemma by creating homogenized imaginary spaces in which different religious communities would neither clash, nor co,operate. This marketing of indifference, it could be argued, had a direct impact on how models of 'living together separately' were !
 culturally reproduced in the educated stratum. Commercial fiction thus had a role to play in the transition from a 'communal' paradigm , where different religious groups clashed precisely because they did have strong and politically contentious links , to either a 'nationalist' or a 'secular' one , where political conflict was replaced by large,scale disengagement.
 
Philippa Williams, University of Cambridge, Department of Geography, Cambridge, UK
Ganga-Jamuni Sanskriti? Exploring the dynamics of communal relations in the aftermath of the Varanasi bomb blasts, 2006
 
My research is situated in the immediate aftermath of the bomb blasts at Sankat Mochan Temple and Cantonment Railway Station in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh in March of this year. My intention is to discuss the various dynamics which came into play following the blasts including the actions of the state, the media, the local level leadership and the general public of Varanasi. I have conducted a small survey of 35 interviewees in the Lanka area of the city, as well as some extended interviews with key informants and general discussions. My paper will discuss how, in such a climate of anticipated communal violence, was the maintenance of peace possible?
 
Ben Zachariah, University of Sheffield, Department of History, Sheffield, United Kingdom
Notes towards rewriting the history of the Indian National Congress
 
Histories of the platform that coordinated the Indian struggle for  freedom from  British rule have far too often been written up from the point of view  of a victorious national liberation movement. The central myth of such histories  remains that of a progressive, secular and popular movement that succeeded in creating a consensual national identity in colonial and post,independence India. This paper is an attempt to reassess this history, and abandon these myths, in the light of the author's own work on languages of legitimation in India, and on the late colonial and Nehruvian period of Congress politics, as well as of other recent work.
 
Yasmin Khan, University of Edinburgh, London, United Kingdom
Everyday life and the Partition of India
 
Partition has generally been conceptualised as a series of atrocities and displacements in Punjab and Bengal or as a constitutional set of decisions made in New Delhi. This paper will start from the premise that Partition was an event which had material and psychological repercussions for large swathes of Northern India. People experienced it through the lens of the media, fear in their localities or through their reconstitution , from subjects of the Raj to citizens of new states. Far from being a discrete or limited event Partition impressed itself very deeply on the social fabric of North India. This paper will look at this transition in the everyday lives of people in Uttar Pradesh and the ways in which violence was only part of the process of making the two nations of India and Pakistan. Everyday life during Partition shaped the creation of Indian citizens and new ideas of nationalism sprung from the series of events associated with the creation of Pakistan. Crucially, the paper will examine how the Partition crisis of the state informed or undermined the new brand of Nehruvian secularism in the earliest days of independent India.
 
Soumhya Venkatesan, University of Manchester, Dept. of Social Anthropology
United Kingdom
Performing Hindu friendly Islam: Muslim craft weavers and their publics, Tamilnadu, South India
 
This paper focuses on the public self,representations and speech acts of a group of Muslim weavers of craft mats in a Tamil town. It argues that the national discourses about craft or hand,made 'traditional' manufactures in India mean that craft is seen as uniquely able to reconcile divisions in society , between Hindus and Muslims and between high caste and low class groups. The Muslim mat weavers, in their ongoing attempt to benefit from recognition as a craft community and in order to diffuse suspicions about their loyalties to the nation, present themselves as traditional suppliers of ritual objects to high caste Brahmin Hindus. This allows them in the public sphere to present themselves as  'Hindu friendly Muslims'. While this presentation is not false, in a sense it stems from 'external' rather than 'internal' identifications as Muslims. To be a 'good Muslim' is a very different enterprise depending on who is applying the criteria: the !
 wider nation, other Muslims, or members of one's community. In the personal sphere, the Muslim weavers rarely talk of themselves as Weavers, or about their relationships with Hindus. Other concerns and considerations predominate including discussions about reform movements within Islam, the need to earn a livelihood, to fulfil social expectations etc. The paper explores these different aspects of the weaver's lives to show the tensions between the everyday and the public spheres.
 
Rubina Jasani, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Sarkar nadi ke us,par rehne wale logon ke liye hay' (The State exists for the people living on the other side of the river).
 
My paper will present material from the Muslim neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad where I did my fieldwork in 2002,2003. It will explore the discourses of the state and state power that evolved within these neighbourhoods after the violence of 2002.
 
I will focus on understanding what the ‘state' actually meant for the riot affected Muslims. How were issues of ‘governmentality' and ‘order' played out in these neighbourhoods? What pressures did it create for the people living in these neighbourhoods? How did they respond to these pressures?  Finally, I will look at the informal networks of ‘control' that were evolving in these neighbourhoods. I will try to show how these in turn reinforced the stereotypes the majority community had of the minorities.
 
Shabnum Tejani, SOAS, Department of History London, UK
Constitution,Making and the Category of the Secular Citizen in India, 1928-1950
 
This paper argues that it was through the process of constitution,making that meanings for communalism and secularism crystallised in India.   A spectrum of groups including peasants, socialists, workers, students and different Muslim organisations contested the kind of nationalism that many at centre of Congress stood for.  In this sense, the meanings of these categories were always fluid.  However, constitutional documents such as the Nehru Report of 1928 framed the debate around nationalism and communalism and, in the process of doing so, hardened their meanings.  The Nehru Report identified the politics of religious minorities, in particular that of the Muslim League's moves to establish provincial autonomy, as communalism and as working against the best interests of nationalism.  These definitions were framed in response to politics and social relations at the grassroots, but ultimately emerged as the result of debates in which only a ha!
 ndful of men engaged in.  In 1947, in the aftermath of partition, 'nationalism' became 'secularism'. Secularism was defined around, through and against the politics of religious minorities, or a politics of communalism.  It was out of the Constituent Assembly Debates (1946,50) that an idea of the secular citizen emerged in India.
 
Roger Jeffery, Patricia Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Studies, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Disputing Contraception: Muslim Reform, Secular Change and Fertility
 
Whatever the specifically Islamic concerns of reformers, they are also involved in attempts to ‘rationalise' and gentrify Muslims. Islamic reformers have also been centrally concerned with routine, orderliness, cleanliness and other aspects of body management, with manners and speech, with what passes for ‘civility' and ‘modernity' in the home and at work, in private and public spheres alike. Yet in India their views on family planning (especially involving permanent forms of contraception-male or female sterilisation) have been seemingly out of step with these concerns (and very different from the approaches recently taken in Bangladesh). These views pose problems for rural Muslim couples who wish to limit their child,bearing and invest in the ‘quality' of a small number of children. Using data from 20 years of village,based fieldwork in western Uttar Pradesh, and from interviews with madrasah managers and religious leaders, we shall illustrate some of the implications of these issues.
 
Theodore P. Wright, State University of New York at Albany, Niskayuna, NY, USA
Naming and Name changing among South Asian Muslims
 
The naming of children is one of the most nearly universal of human social activities. A name can be a marker of identity both for the person's family and social group as well as for outsiders. The former serves to elicit favorable treatment from other members and the latter enables stereotyping and negative discrimination to take place with respect to jobs, residence and marriage. In case of "affirmative action", a group name may facilitate obtaining benefits from society. For a minority group the dilemma is how to maximize the benefits of solidarity and minimize the costs. The risk is that in avoiding discriminatory treatment by the dominant ethnic, a minority may assimilate so far as to lose its identity over a series of generations.
Indian Muslims have exhibited both patterns of naming behavior: defiantly proclaiming their minority membership in North India with Arabic names and concealing it in east coast communities and South India, especially among Ismaili sects. By way of comparison, I shall show how name changing has operated in the United States.
 
Jacob De Roover, Ghent University, Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent, Belgium
India and the Inexperience of the Secular
 
1. How could one experience the secular or secularism in Indian everyday life? I will argue that one cannot: there is no 'secular realm' to be experienced in Indian society and no 'the secular' as an experiential unit in Indian culture. Therefore, 'secularism' and 'the secular' fail to make sense. Today, 'secularism' can refer to anything-from a neutral state through peaceful co,existence to gender equality. This situation has been mistaken for the growth of a new, uniquely Indian, concept of 'the secular', while in fact the term and its cognates are devoid of meaning both in everyday language and academic parlance.
2. How has this situation emerged, where a vacuous term is invoked as the panacea to all ills of Indian society? The colonial past holds the answer. From the early 19th century onwards, concepts of western political thought such as ‘religious toleration' were employed by the British as though the socio,cultural situation in India was a variant of that in Europe. Different ‘religions' co,existed in India, the colonials assumed, in the same way as Christian denominations lived side by side in Europe. Therefore, ‘toleration' and ‘the secular state' were indispensable here as elsewhere.
3. Colonial state policy compelled its subjects to adopt this language. The spokesmen of Indian traditions learned to invoke ‘toleration' and ‘the secular state' as the safeguards of their ‘religion' and its ‘sacred law'. The fluent use of such terms became a precondition of survival as a traditional community under colonialism. After 1947, the secular state of India took over the role of the Raj and continued its invocation and imposition of western political language. Bare necessity has given Indian citizens a remarkable fluency in making use of ‘secularism' and ‘the secular', even though the meaning of these words is utterly unclear and has no roots in experience.
 
Filippo Osella and Carolina Osella, University of Sussex, Dept of Anthropology
Brighton, UK
Between business and community: Muslim entrepreneurs in Kerala and the Gulf
 
The paper will focus on the role played by a number of very successful Muslim entrepreneurs in the political, religious an social life of Kerala, South India.  These are both Kerala, and Gulf,based businessmen , some belonging to the established middle,classes while others are new,rich who made money in the Gulf in the last 20 years - who are at the forefront of the neo,liberal post,liberalization economy, ‘innovators' who have introduced new business and labour practices in the both Kerala and the Gulf.  Embodying the dream of success of all Kerala Muslims - in many cases their lives are veritable ‘rag,to,riches stories - these Muslim entrepreneurs have a very public presence. Concerned with the ‘upliftment' of the whole community, they are involved in community associations, orphanages, schools, trade organizations and everyday politics , albeit only a few of them are directly connected either to religious organizations (reformist or otherwise) or to political parties (mainly Muslim League).  Here we find that their orientation towards modernization of social practices goes alongside with ,on the one hand, an effort to produce a ‘Muslim modernity' (where the main referent points are the Gulf and, more recently, Malaysia & Indonesia), and on the other the pursuit of particular business interests.  This in turn leads to debates about the relationship between community and state.
 
Magnus Marsden, University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Love and Elopement in Northern Pakistan
 
Panel title : Everyday Life and the secular in South Asia Convenor : Dr. Yasmin Khan & Prof. Roger Jeffery Paper title : Love and Elopement in Northern Pakistan Paper Abstract (ca. 300 words) : My paper explores concerns over love and sexuality in Chitral , a remote and mountainous region of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province populated primarily by Khowar,speaking Sunni and Shi'a Ismai'li Muslims. In the setting of Chitral today, where men of religious authoritity who are members of a wide range of Islamist parties currently represent Chitrali Muslims in the country's local and national assemblies, pre,marital love relationships and elopement marriage are a source of contentious debate amongst Chitralis. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with both men and women in Chitral's a village and small town over the past ten years, it documents the nature of the dynamic conceptions that Chitralis hold about ‘romantic love'. It also makes connections between these dimensions of Chitrali life and anthropological work concerned with intimate life, emotional expression, and the emergence of new forms of religious,political activism in settings within and beyond the Muslim world. The paper explores these issues in relationship to the changing shape of Chitrali society over the past generation, especially with regard to the ongoing importance of distinctions between quasi,aristocrats and commoners: maters of descent and hierarchy are central to the making of marriage choices in Chitral. Yet this a dimension of Chitrali life that is now also being challenged by new sources of wealth and status prestige , including migration to the Gulf and employment in international NGOs , alongside the growing political importance of these new social groups. In this context of social and political trasnformation, I argue that exploring cases of elopement marriage furnishes a unique window into debtes important within and beyond south Asian settings concerning what it means to live a virtous Muslim life.
 
Simona Vittorini, School of Oriental and African Studies, Department of Politics and International Studies, London, UK
"Banal Secularism". Electoral Practices as Symbols of Nehruvian Nationalism
 
This paper investigates the relationship between party symbolism and the political system it belongs to. More precisely, it examines how party and electoral symbols reflect the values and the characteristics of this political system. Beginning by recognising the importance of party symbols within democratic societies (their role in distinguishing competitors in the electoral system and their evocative potential) we examine the party symbolism of a peculiar democracy, India, where there is tension between the rules that preside over the electoral system and the general principles of electoral competition. Having introduced India's electoral system and the regulations that govern the allotment of symbols to political parties, we offer a qualitative analysis of India's party symbolism providing some significant examples, and conclude that the study of electoral mechanisms and the repertoire of party symbols sheds significant light towards understanding India's political system and its functions and mechanics. With its repertoire of simple representations of everyday objects and its compliance to the rules that regulate the allotment of symbols to a fixed list, Indian electoral symbolism is the outward manifestation of the commitment of the post-colonial state to the principles that formed the basis of Nehruvism: secularism, democracy, socio-economic development, and modernisation.