Book Review
Parveen, Nazima Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity, New Delhi, Bloomsbury India, 2021, 312 pages, Rs. 1299/- ISBN 978-93-89000-89-4
Social Change: 53(1) 144–157 2023 pg. 152-155
In India, residential segregation on the basis of caste and religion is not a recent phenomenon and not confined to one religious community and is widespread across regions, linguistic communities and religions, but the intensity and the religion-centric politics of the current times surely desires’ fresh research perspectives and studies. Nazima Parveen’s first book focuses on the Muslim community and the process of religious segregation in Old Delhi/Shahjahanabad.
The Pew Center Report[1] (2021) published couple of months back validates what we have known and have been observing for some time now in the present day India. The report through surveys in various regions of India shows large proportion of Indians prefer to stay in neighbourhoods of their caste and religion, want to make friends and marry within their communities (endogamy), hence religious or caste based segregation is what large majority of Indians want even today in 2021. Often, their belief centering on the notion of religious ‘tolerance’ does not include intermixing with other religions’. Religious segregation is a manifestation of such beliefs and practices.
Two very important books on the same issue of religious segregation of Muslims in the recent past have been of Ghazala JamilAccumulation by Segregation: Muslim Localities in Delhi (OUP, 2017) and edited book by Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer, Muslims In Indian Cities: Trajectories Of Marginalisation (HarperCollins, 2012), Nazima Parveen in her book provides the context and the background for the segregation of Muslim community as a consequence of historical processes.
The first chapter starts with tracing the developments in colonial India regarding the ‘communalisation of space’ from 1809 up to 1939. In this chapter, she documents the colonial administration’s intervention through policy in the form of various decrees/declarations/ municipal bye laws/ police orders with regard to local customs and religious practices. She emphasizes that it was the administrative colonial demarcation that produced three categories of space: ‘Hindu dominated’, ‘Muslim dominated’ and ‘mixed’ areas. Problematization of cow sacrifice under the British while it had never been an issue before to post 1857 changes in the Delhi city’s demography and socio-political conditions have been explained in detail.
Second chapter takes a closer look at the pre-Partition politics of 1940s which gave rise to the discourse around homeland, the idea of Pakistan. There have been many books and much discussion on the pre-partition violence and the communalization of this period. She adds interviews with some older residents of Old Delhi/Shahjahanabad to add more depth to the chapter.
Third chapter focuses on the post-independence
period from 1947 to 1974 which made Muslim dominated areas appear as
problematic ‘mini-Pakistans’ in the popular imagination. Politicization of Indian Muslim identity can
be traced back to this period in terms of belongingness and citizenship. The
institutions of the new Indian nation state were compromised on the lines of
religion, for example, often police acted in a biased manner in several
instances of communal conflict. The meat politics led to communal riot at
Kishanganj in 1974 where Muslims were targeted by RSS, Jan Sangh and a section
of the police force (Vijay Pal Singh enquiry committee) (pg. 183).
Wars with Pakistan created a situation where Muslim dominated areas started being seen with concerns around internal security. Fourth chapter deals with the politics of redevelopment and resettlement in the Emergency era. The administrative politics of the 1970s transformed the community-space relationship. Urban development and its politicization through the two episodes of Jama Masjid Clearance scheme and Turkman Gate redevelopment scheme have been discussed in detail, how statutory, metropolitan and municipal authorities formed a collaborative team and zeroed in on ending Muslim ‘segregation’ through forced clearance and sterilization at the two Shajahanabad localities.
“Do you think we are mad to destroy one Pakistan to create another Pakistan?” (pg. 231)
Jagmohan, then DDA Vice Chairman had given this (in) famous reply to the residents of Turkman Gate who had approached him for help for suitable settlement relocation in view of the threat of their homes being demolished by the administration.
Portrayal of Muslim community as being anti-development and their resistance as anti-establishment led to Muslim localities and their image being propagated as ‘culturally segregated and politically separated spaces’ (pg.245).
In the conclusion chapter, Nazima Parveen discusses the dilemma of Delhi Muslims, largely reflecting the microcosm of the macrocosm of the larger Muslim question of identity and citizenship,
“For Delhi Muslims, homeland was nothing but an evocation of the right to live and perform their religious and cultural practices in the galies, mohallas and ilaqe where they were the majority…… conflicting claims and realities of the partition turned every Muslim household, gali, mohalla and ilaqa of Delhi into contested zones. I argue that these various assertions of homelands were eventually reduced to the theory of ‘two nation’ or communal antagonism.” (pg. 267)
Over the years, she observes how the Muslim localities and their perceptions changed as she sums up the changing trajectory and politics 1940s onwards,
“…in the 1940s, as Muslim dominated areas that were to be administered for the sake of communal peace; in the 1950s as ‘Muslim zones’ that needed to be ‘protected’; in the 1960s as ‘isolated’, unhygienic cultural pockets that were to be cleaned and Indianised; and in the 1970s, as locations of ‘internal threat’-‘mini Paksitans’ that were to be dismantled and integrated. This book thus suggests that ‘Muslim localities’ are discursively constituted political entities which may or may not correspond to the actual demographic configuration of any administrative urban unit…” (pg. 274)
Through the idea of ‘Contested Homeland’ this book suggests that the relations between Muslim communities and their living spaces have evolved out of a long process of politicization and communalization of space in Delhi. Nazima Parveen’s book has focused on the Muslim community’s interaction with the colonial to post-independent Indian state and the effects of state policy in creating segregated spaces for the community, especially the British government policy of separate electorates’ to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency era clearance/sterilization fiasco. Her work is rich with details of history and concludes at the Emergency period to contextualize the present religious segregation debate.
Although, the multi-layered process of segregation cannot be seen just from the prism of historical processes and as a result of state policy. The view from top as opposed to view from the below as the book focuses and creates its narrative mainly from archival sources, reports’, written and oral accounts, Shahjahanabad’s complex demography has been explained briefly through the caste factor (Qureshis’ of Qasabpura, Telis’ of Turkman Gate) discussed with regard to different incidents but largely the factors of caste-class segregation of various kin-based neighbourhoods’ of Shahjahanabad remain largely unexplored. Some more ethnographic details and interviews from the locals including the Muslim lower castes’ and women living in caste based mohallas could have been added to give a diverse people’s perspective.
Since, religious segregation is a complex process and apart from historical processes and state policy, there are many other factors which need a deeper analysis. Muslim community at Shahjahanabad (and elsewhere as well) have also used their active agency or the choice to reside in the Muslim dominated areas due to various cultural factors ranging from availability of halal food to presence of mosques which cannot be overlooked.
In the present socio-political scenario, the insecurity factor again became relevant in the post-liberalization era leading to religious segregation. The communal politics of BJP-RSS leading to the Ayodhya -Babri Masjid riots in the 1990s to Gujarat riots of 2002 to Delhi riots in 2020 have had a deep effect on Muslim psyche and fear of being targeted in non-Muslim areas by the right wing mobs.
Nazima Parveen’s Contested Homeland: Politics of Space and Identity is well-researched and relevant book for the present socio-political debates on Muslim segregation and the larger Muslim question of belongingness.
Reviewed by:
Dr. Uzma Azhar
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