Muslims in Indian Cities

With more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms - not to say anything about the communal waves of violence that have affected them over the last 25 years. In India's cities, these developments find contrasted expressions. While Muslims are everywhere lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow). These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping. This book supplements an ethnographic approach of Muslims in 11 Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first hand account of an untold story.

'This is certainly the best empirically-researched book on Muslims in contemporary India that I've read so far. It brilliantly highlights the magnitude of Muslim marginalisation in India, and the desperate need to address it.' Yogi Sikand, author, Muslims In India Since 1947 and Bastions Of The Believers: Madrasas And Islamic Education In India
'Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot have assembled an impressive array of scholars to produce a fascinating portrait of the state of India's Muslim communities in various urban settings. The analyses in this volume are well-researched, offer new insights and provide a complex, and often disturbing, accounts of the state of Muslim communities across metropolitan India. The contributors to this work have eschewed facile generalisations, have provided fine-grained accounts and have displayed an admirable sensitivity to both historical as well as contemporary social forces that have helped define the current socio-economic and political conditions of India's most sizable minority in their urban milieus. This work will contribute much to addressing an important lacuna in the pertinent literature on the contemporary politics and status of India's Muslim minority.' Sumit Ganguly Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia
'Urban India, the locus of India's economic surge, is home to over a third of India's Muslims - and it is there that the diverse cultures of Muslim India once flourished. Yet today, India's urban Muslims are the most disprivileged of India's urban citizens and their life-chances are sharply constrained in every respect. In this pioneering set of political ethnographies, the predicament of Indian Muslims is examined across a dozen cities. Jaffrelot and Gayer's substantial volume at once illuminates empirical conditions and tests theories about ghettoisation, integration, and political attitudes of India's urban Muslims.' Sunil Khilnani, Director, India Institute, King's College London
'Jaffrelot's range of scholarship is amazing and his new book, Muslims in Indian Cities, co-edited with Laurent Gayer, illustrates well his wide-ranging interests. The contributions are instructive and insightful and cover a much-neglected theme in contemporary South Asia.' Professor Mushirul Hasan, Director General, National Archives of India

Laurent Gayer is Research Fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), currently posted at the Centre de sciences humaines (CSH), Delhi. Christophe Jaffrelot is Director of CERI (Sciences Po, Paris) and the author of several acclaimed books on South Asia published by Hurst.

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