Faith and social change in India – as seen by a Muslim research-activist collective

Pluralism Working Paper no. 7: Exploring new sites of social transformation

The existing mindset of civil society organizations in India is insufficiently aware of new sites of social transformation springing up in India. According to Shahrukh Alam and Khalid Anis Ansari of the Patna Collective, lower caste Muslims and Muslim women for instance are instigating change independently from civil society organizations.

The two founding members of Patna Collective describe in the Pluralism Working Paper series how their personal journeys as Muslims in India and their research has made them think differently about identity, social justice and change. Ansari tells about his feelings after the demolition of the Babri Masjid (mosque) in 1992 (followed by large scale violence between Hindu and Muslims): “… I was raised in a very secular environment, as my family was not particularly religious during my youth. I could not really make sense of what had happened. I didn’t actually find the incident very disturbing. […] But I remember quite clearly that after the demolition, my classmates directed strange and sarcastic remarks toward me. […] I was forced to realize that I was a Muslim. “Later, Ansari also got confronted with caste tensions within the Muslim community. His surname ‘Ansari’ used to be a title adopted by the Muslim weaver caste, yet Ansari’s father was not a weaver, but a civil servant. Although he did not feel disadvantaged in the economic sense, Ansari regularly overheard pejorative remarks directed at his lower caste identity. “A sense of contempt subsists against lower-caste Muslims, which is embedded somewhere in the upper-caste Muslim consciousness.”

Ansari analyses how the construction of a monolithic Muslim identity in India (building on a narrative of victimhood vis-à-vis the Hindu majority) has served to maintain upper caste domination within the Muslim community – which mirrors the domination of a small group of upper caste males over most state, business, industrial, media and academic institutions, including even civil society organizations in India. “But such unbridled power in a minority group, like that of the upper castes, is also a cause for concern. The threat of lower caste or gender assertion always looms large. […] In order to tame internal rebellion from lower-ranking sections, they resort to communal violence.“ Religious cleavages, this discourse claims, is fictitious and constructed to polarize along religious lines and thereby “veil the primary contradiction of Indian society, caste […].” This way of arguing is by and large the position of the Pasmanda Movement, a lower caste Muslim movement which has made a strong impact on the Indian polity recently. The Pasmanda Movement challenges the existing privileged structures of power (Hindu dominated, but also upper-caste dominated) which utilize universalistic and modernist vocabulary, yet employ it to suppress other religious communities and lower castes.

The conversations captured in the Pluralism Working Paper touch upon the limits of the universalist human rights discourse. As Shahrukh Alam describes: “ […] the focus on universal, secular discourse around human rights will not decrease […] the tensions and conflicts between religious groups. How could it, when the concrete ‘neutrality’ of the secular state often results in the prevalence of norms of [the] Hindu […] majority? “ According to Alam, the Muslim minority’s struggle for ‘cultural rights’ needs to be understood within this context. The tension between women’s rights and e.g. Islamic legislation is more complex than a simple choice between a ‘backward’ religion and human rights. Alam: “Most feminists – I won’t call them Islamic feminists, but Muslims who are feminists – do not wish to condemn the Sharia for its breach of women’s rights. Even apart from this breach, however, they found it difficult to embrace the Sharia as the cultural right. They suggested that this issue did not have to be reduced to the choice between a rejection or embrace of Islamic legislation.” Relating to this search for flexibility and dialogue, both Alam and Ansari describe their ventures with Patna Collective as an independent maneuvering between a universalist discourse and a relativist position. “We are trying to make sense of the various movements within the Muslim community, like recent caste, class and gender movements. We are trying to understand how these movements address the issues of pluralism, globalizations, redistributive justice, identity, communalism and secularism in India.” Aiming to understand these new sites of social transformation is a necessary pre-requisite to attempts to address religious violence and stimulate pluralism, according to Alam and Ansari.

Interested in the work of Patna Collective? Read more.