Author: Mushirul Hasan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 383
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195658035
Description
This important and comprehensive work analyses the current condition of India's polity and its relationships with Muslims. It also provides new information on India's Muslims before and after independence.
In this brilliant book Prof Hasan looks at the origins of Muslim separatism under the British, at the making of partition, and the meanings of these for a host of Muslim communities, families and individuals. His book examines the establishment of the 'Nehruvian consensus' - with its secular vision for India's future - in the 1940s and 1950s, and delineates secular identities as well as the Muslim organizations which run counter to this process.
Prof Hasan illustrates the role of Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Milia Islamia as bearer of the 'beacon lights' of modern and secular understandings of the Muslim future in India. He than examines the break-up of the Nehruvian consensus from the 1960s through the present, focusing in particular on the reasons for the growth of communal activity and the retreat of both Hindus and Muslims into communal political camps. Finally the book surveys the state of India's Muslims in the period after the demolition of Babri Masjid.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Tables
Glossary
CHAPTERS
Introduction
The Myth of Muslim Unity: Colonial and National Narratives
Making a Separate Nation
India Partitioned: The other Face of Freedom
Secularism: The Post-colonial Predicament
Forging Secular Identities
Redefining Boundaries: Modernist Interpretations and the New 'Intellectual Structure'
Empowering Differences: political actions, sectarian Violence and the Retreat of secularism
Ayodhya and its Consequences: Reappraising Minority Identity
APPENDIXES
Distribution of Muslim Population in India
The Divine Law
Resolution of the All-India Jamiyat-Ulama-i Islam Conference, Calcutta,31 October 1945
What Does Secularism Means?
Myths Relating to Minorities in India
Select Bibliography
Index