From the title of the book, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India, one may initially expect to read another political scientific account of the position of Muslims in contemporary India against the background of the colonial legacy of the country and the tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities, especially after the rise to power of the Hindu nationalist BJP party in 2014. But right from the start it is clear that the author intends to divert from this common macro-level political frame of analysis. Menon embarks on an alternative understanding of the past and the present of India's multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, even if that reality is hotly denied by Indian (Hindu) nationalists.
The book is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2011 onwards among Muslims in Old Delhi. Some of her interlocutors and their families have lived in the city from long before the partition in 1947. Others, instead of leaving India for Pakistan after the partition, decided to move to Old Delhi to join fellow Muslim inhabitants.
Menon's prime focus is place-making by Muslim residents in Old Delhi. She uses a fairly broad definition of place-making, ranging from organizing physical places such as mosques and meeting rooms, to improving local social cohesion and local networks among Muslims, but also various narratives of place and belonging, and individual symbolic and religious acts such as moral self-improvement. Menon confines herself to cases and situations with an explicitly religious character.
The book consists of two parts. Part one, “Landscapes of inequality,” deals with the position of Muslims in contemporary Old Delhi. The two chapters describe the precarious position of Muslims as residents of Old Delhi and as a minority in India. In chapter one Menon gives an account of the marginal socioeconomic position, and the constant acts of Islamophobia, the surveillance of the state and the violence many Muslims encounter in everyday life.
The testimonies of the Muslim residents of Old Delhi collected by Menon reveal how they experience exclusion and discrimination, invigorated by structural political and social inequalities, and how Muslims are forced to conceal their religious identity as much as possible in order to be able to function relatively normally in the city. Most of them prefer to stay in the neighbourhood to avoid confrontations. In this way, the place acquires a very specific meaning for them. In this way many young Muslims become increasingly isolated from mainstream society, forcing some of them to consider a career in crime to earn a living, or join militant Islamic groups out of sheer frustration. This in turn fuels the public opinion that Muslims do not belong in India and are a threat to security.
Chapter two deals with issues of gender against the background of the precarious and marginalized position of Muslims in general. I found this one of the most informative and compelling chapters of the book. It not only shows that women have to deal with the challenges all Muslims face, but also with gendered inequalities, hierarchies and violence. The account in this chapter clearly demonstrates not only that Muslim women find themselves in an even more complex and precarious situation than men, but also that they are far more active, resilient, experienced and inventive in maintaining social cohesion and fighting injustice.
Part two of the book, “Place-making,” consists of three chapters each dealing with a particular mode of Muslim place-making, notably moral self-improvement, bridging communal gaps and redefining Muslimness. Instead of concentrating on how the texture of the local community threatens to fall apart, Menon focuses on more inclusive practices of residents to avert both social and moral disintegration and to strengthen themselves.
Chapter three, “Perfecting the Self” focuses on individual and collective practices of Muslim moral self-making. One of these practices concerns the activities of the “Muslim Club” where Muslim women come together and develop their own understanding of Islam as against the majority of adherers of Deobandi and Barelvi in the neighbourhood. The other part is the personal account of Abida, a Muslim woman who tried to piece together her fragmented and distorted life by acquiring knowledge, moral self-improvement and conveying knowledge to fellow Muslims.
Chapter four, “Living with Difference,” deals with how Muslims engage with both internal doctrinal differences among Muslims, and interreligious differences, how they are played out and acted upon in everyday life. Menon pays special attention to attempts to bridge gaps and to enhance peaceful coexistence in the neighbourhood and in the rest of the city.
Chapter five, “Life after Death” deals with how Muslims redefine their Muslimness after dramatic events and radical changes in their lives. The chapter relates the story of Ferhana who, after her husband passed away, redefined herself as a Muslim woman but under very different circumstances. Although Menon pays ample attention to the death rituals as they are practiced by Muslims, the chapter is mainly about the individual trajectory of Ferhana.
The narratives and everyday practices of Menon's interlocutors are rich and provide a valuable picture of how they make sense of their lives, and how they understand place, given their precarious and marginalized position. In that respect the book provides a thorough and detailed account of what it means to be Muslim in India and in Old Delhi today. Menon guides us through the various activities of the residents of what she calls place-making. Be it practices of moral self-improvement, gatherings of Muslim women or attempts to bridge Sunni-Shi'a divides, and even Muslim–Hindu divides, the book is about what it means to be Muslim under these circumstances.
The strongest aspect of Menon's analysis is that she does not replace the regular macro-sociological and political scientific analyses of struggle, political manipulation and communal violence, by a quasi-romantic picture of everyday life, where ethnic and religious dividing lines are irrelevant, and people live together harmoniously and peacefully. Indeed, too much of the current ethnographic work in conflict-ridden situations tends to pit political struggle and violent confrontations between activists and politicians against local-level everyday forms of cohabitation, as if these are mutually exclusive dimensions of life. We find such strong juxtapositions in some of the ethnographic work on post-war former Yugoslavia, propounding the idea that before the war Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians lived together peacefully and religious dividing lines did not affect local-level everyday life.
Menon shows how the big political global and regional issues and developments, and the supralocal communal divides act upon and shape experiences and practices on a local level. Menon's book is about what Thomas Eriksen once called “Small Places, Large Issues.” The everyday life experiences of Muslims in Old Delhi constitute a window through which events on a global scale are assessed and lived through.
Although the reader (at least I) tends to get lost every now and then in the abundance of narratives, events and life histories, Menon's book is worth reading and sheds new light on the position of Muslims seen from their own perspective. But I also have some critical remarks.
The first concerns Menon's concept of place-making. Part two of the book is about place-making, about Muslims places, and about various understandings of place. Following Appadurai, she argues that places are made, and locality is emergent from actions of subjects in everyday life against the backdrop of macro-level developments. She states that: “Indeed, Old Delhi emerges as a Muslim place in everyday life through the words and deeds of people who live there, but also from the ways that people elsewhere talk about it or relate to it” (p. 35).
Menon uses a very broad understanding of place and place-making. That in itself makes sense, but I would have liked to read a more elaborate assessment of the concept of place-making and a more thorough engagement with the scholarly literature on place and locality. Menon's account is about how people understand place, what meaning they attach to specific (physical and social) places, and how that relates to what it means to be Muslim. The question arises why this is called place-making? I would argue that place-making has a clear collective, communal connotation. Place-making has inbuilt temporality and consists of several steps of which attaching meaning to place is the first.
Again, a more rigorous engagement with the literature especially with the discussions around place-making would have helped here. In that regard I was a bit surprised not to find Thomas Tweed's book, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Reference Tweed2006), dealing explicitly with acts of religious place-making. The central concept is dwelling which is a three-fold process of designing, building and inhabiting (religious) life-worlds, physically and morally as well as mentally and experientially. Also, the work of Kim Knott would have been instructive in Menon's analysis, because Knott (Reference Knott2005) very explicitly points at the symbolic, moral and spiritual dimensions of place-making.
My second comment concerns the implications of place-making by Muslims in Old Delhi. Are acts of place-making in the way Menon describes them, forms of resistance or are they mainly coping mechanisms? In her seminal study on sugarcane labourers in Brazil, Death without Weeping, Scheper-Hughes (Reference Scheper-Hughes1993) draws on Michel de Certeau's distinction between tactical and strategic acting to understand the lives of these labourers and their families under the extremely harsh and difficult circumstances they have to live in. Tactical acting is individual, defensive and powerless; it is a survival practice, a coping mechanism without any perspective of change. Strategic acting, on the other hand, may become a form of resistance and may develop into some sort of coordinated collective endeavour with a plan to change the situation. Scheper-Hughes argues that the extremely difficult situation of these people makes the possibility of change very slim, but there were definitely also moments of strategic acting among the labourers.
In several places in her analysis, Menon actually describes acts of resistance, such as the Muslim Club activities, but also Abida's moral self-improvement and her eagerness to acquire and convey knowledge. This is resistance against unequal power hierarchies, and it shows the agency, resourcefulness and resilience of these women, but the question then remains why this is called place-making.
A last comment and related to the previous one concerns forms of informal leadership in relation to what James Scott calls “hidden and public transcripts” of resistance (Reference Scott1990). Menon refers to Scott but did not address the importance he attached to hidden forms of resistance, communication and knowledge, invisible to the outside world and the oppressor but nevertheless crucial for effective resistance. I gather there must have been forms of hidden communication and networks among Muslims in Old Delhi, and I could imagine that Islam would play a crucial role in shaping these “hidden transcripts.” A more systematic discussion of such forms of activity would have certainly provided insight into the dynamics of everyday life in Old Delhi and it would take away the impression that Muslims are just victims. Menon's account clearly refutes this.
Despite these shortcomings I consider Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India a valuable document that seriously takes issue with the lives of the people in question.
