Communal Living: Religion, Class, and the Politics of Dwelling in Small-town Gujarat (original) (raw)
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Through an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of Delhi, this article examines the constitutive relationship between displacements and city-making. It addresses Jangpura-Bhogal's post-colonial history (1947-present) through instances of the erasure of Muslim property, spaces, and histories, and the reoccupations, replacements, and redefinition of spaces, properties, and memories that they constituted. The article shows how protracted material displacements of Muslim property and spaces have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal. By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract 'diverse space' to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present. The discussion focuses on the processual/everyday, 'below the radar', and, at times, invisible displacements, more than sudden eruptions of violence or overt ideological projects aimed at a deliberate Muslim erasure. Thus, Delhi's post-colonial history is not only about the well-rehearsed story of migrations and arrivals but equally about departures and displacements that have produced the neighbourhood and the city as particular kinds of majoritarian places and spaces. Current acts of Muslim displacement, that is, the Delhi 'riots' of February 2020 are enabled not only through visible and violent histories of Muslim marginalization, but also by longer histories of non-overt erasures, displacements, and replacements.
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In today's neo-liberal economic milieu, Muslims in Delhi are being rediscovered as a human resource that is positioned as a specific part in the accumulation project which has little use for prejudice per se, but only to the extent that it aides the project. Muslims are grateful for jobs and businesses that take advantage of their skills, time, labour and assets and other supposed integrative advantages that this relationship brings with it. These neighbourhoods in Delhi are integrated in the city economy, and even global economy, but only so far as the balance of accumulation of capital is tipped in favour of spaces elsewhere.
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Journal of Social Inclusion Studies, 2023
Ahmedabad, founded by Sultan Ahmed Shah in 1411, is the commercial capital of Gujarat and home to pharmaceuticals, construction and textiles industries. It was also known as Manchester of the East because of the thriving textile industries. Underneath this economic growth story lies a city that has been affected by several instances of communal violence since 1947. Post-independence, the city has recorded four major events of communal violence: in 1969, 1985, 1991 and 2002 (Ministry of Home Affairs, GoI, 2007, p. 49). As migration ensued as a result of repeated instances of communal violence, Ahmedabad came to acquire the characteristics of a segregated city with a distinct Muslim Ghetto-Juhapura. This article focuses on the increasing ghettoisation of the city and the legal provisions of the state, which have also contributed to the process of segregation.