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| 1 |
ID:
152348
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I examine how Old Delhi’s Shias construct community across religious and sectarian lines to live with others in contemporary India. I focus on the Islamic month of Muharram, when Shias ritually mourn the death of Imam Husain and his companions at the Battle of Karbala. Often a period marked by sectarian violence and tension in South Asia, here I focus on everyday attempts to bridge difference, diffuse tensions, and enable broader understandings of community amongst Old Delhi’s Muslims, and between Muslims and Hindus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst diverse groups of Muslims residing in Old Delhi, I examine how religious practices and narratives during and immediately after Muharram, provide an arena for new ways of positioning Shias in Old Delhi, and in India today. I argue that Shii rituals and narratives during Muharram, while marking religious and sectarian distinctions, simultaneously enable forms of identity that challenge exclusionary constructions of community and nation and allow Old Delhi’s diverse communities to live with difference in contemporary India.
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| 2 |
ID:
185583
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| Summary/Abstract |
The many Muslim women who make up India’s burgeoning informal economy, challenge any attempt to reduce them to homemakers whose lives are delimited by culture and religion. An examination of their lives reveals the complex forces that shape their worlds, and illuminates how they variously negotiate landscapes of inequality in contemporary India. Here I focus on the biography of one Muslim widow to illustrate how she labours to live and dream in contemporary India as various social forces intersect to create precarity in her life. While neoliberal priorities and a shrinking social safety-net affect underprivileged women across religious lines, the intersection of gender, class, and religion in Hindu majoritarian India has made it even more challenging for low-income Muslim women like her to make ends meet. However, dominant forces are not totalising, and the biographical method reveals how one woman negotiates precarity, employing various skills as she adapts to changing conditions, juggling multiple jobs to meet expenses, and envisioning a better future. We see not just the deep inequalities that create precarity for some, but also how dreams can be a material force in the world.
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