![]() Politics Of Heritage SitesDavid Lelyveld MUSLIM POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN POSTCOLONIALINDIA: MONUMENTS, MEMORY, CONTESTATION By Hilal Ahmed Routledge, New Delhi, 2014, pp. 328, Rs. 850.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 5 May 2015 For many observers the destruction of the Babri Masjid in
1992 stands as a pivotal event in turning India from a pluralistic and secular
society to one founded on a monolithic concept of ‘Hindu’ identity. An effort
to purge Muslims from Indian history and marginalize them in the present, the
project of tearing down the mosque and replacing it with a temple to Rama has
played a central role in the narrative of India’s transformation from the
Nehruvian vision of social justice to Modi sarkar.
In recent years several stimulating examinations of the
modern history of premodern ‘monuments’, particularly those identified in some
sense as Muslim, have added insights into the cultural dimension of politics
and political dimension of culture.1 These books generally reach their climax
in accounts of the Babri Masjid vandalization. Hilal Ahmed has now added a
political scientist’s perspective to the study of ‘monuments’ by concentrating
on legal regulations by the colonial and postcolonial state, claims by individuals
and organization to authority over historic buildings and sites, and popular
mobilization by competing Muslim ‘political actors’.
Hilal Ahmed’s focus is on the nature of ‘Muslim politics’,
that is, organizations and issues that were considered relevant to people who
identified themselves or were identified by others as Muslims. What exactly
that might mean, Ahmed makes clear, has been contested, varied from place to
place, and has also changed over time. Muslim political concerns were not
necessarily religious. In the colonial period, that is, before Partition,
‘Muslim politics’ was dominated by constitutional demands for Muslim
separat-ism. In the early decades of Independent India, the dominant issues for
politically concerned Muslims, at least in northern India, were the Urdu
language, Muslim personal law, and Aligarh Muslim University.
From roughly 1970–1990, however, such issues, Ahmed claims,
were ‘over-shadowed’ by concerns about ‘Muslim heritage’, that is, demands for
Muslim ‘control over the Indo-Islamic historic sites’. In any case, this is the
focus of the present book. He has almost nothing to say about the history of communal
violence or the declining economic and educational status of Indian Muslims
during this period. Ahmed wants to show how the colonial and postcolonial legal
regimes that identified and presided over religious endowments and ‘protected
monuments’ set the stage for renewed political conflicts between mobilized
Hindu versus Muslim constituencies. Ahmed doesn’t deny—or even discuss—the force
of the Hindutva bigotry in the Ayodhya conflict ... Table of Contents >> |