Abstract
Hilal Ahmed’s Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory and Contestation analyzes the process that renders Indo-Islamic historic buildings as official monuments and how contemporary Muslim communities imbue new meaning and context to the monuments to commemorate a purportedly dead or lifeless past. To do so, Ahmed focuses on the politics of monumentalization through close examination of state, national and local discourses on the Indian Muslim community, law and policy documents, and archival information. This book is a uniquely interdisciplinary work that examines history, law and political action among Indian Muslim communities to help understand the making and meaning of monuments from colonial India to the postcolonial period of 1970–1990.
The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an extensive introduction to the range of scholarly work, examining Muslim communities and political discourse. The author rightly points that the vast majority of writings on Muslim communities focuses upon Muslim Personal Law, strategies of empowerment and transcending backwardness or the traditional markers of political life including Muslim organizations and pressure groups, voting patterns and key personalities and figures. Furthermore, academic discourse is dominated by the dichotomy of western modernity and a version of Islam, where upper-class and upper-caste male Muslim elites maintain a stronghold over the community that prevents Muslims from engaging in a larger secular and national politics. As such, scholars who deviate from these approaches with vigorous empirical work that demonstrates the complexity of lived realities and communities are best furthering scholarship in this area. Ahmed provides a brief but substantive overview of a number of influential and diverse thinkers including Syed Shahabuddin, Imtiaz Ahmed, Moin Shakir, Asghar Ali Engineer and Mushirul Hasan, articulating their positions and possible limitations in their theoretical frameworks to set the stage for later chapters, which focus more directly on monuments themselves.
Chapter 2 focuses on the monumentalization of buildings that took place during the colonial period, where colonial perceptions largely overlooked and subsumed the significance of Muslim monuments. The colonial travellers held stereotypical notions that Muslims were invaders and external to India’s real heritage. For example, the well-known travel writer Francois Bernier found it astonishing that many Muslim communities were also divided along caste lines and shared a cultural life with non-Muslims. As a result, if Muslim sites were ‘non-functional’, they were rendered ‘dead sites’ under colonial laws. Chapter 3 looks at the continuities and discontinuities of the process of monumentalization in postcolonial India and the legal complexities associated with Indo-Islamic sites. In particular, it examines the principles adopted by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) for the conservation of protected monuments, the nature of archaeological excavation and the conflicting relationship between the right to worship and secular conservation of historical monuments.
Chapters 4 and 5 are case studies of the theoretical framework and propositions expounded in the previous chapters drawing on two major Indo-Islamic monuments in India, the Jama Masjid and the Babri Masjid. While Indo-Islamic monuments could potentially encompass cemeteries, tombs, dargahs and khanqahs, mosques are clearly predominant. The Jama Masjid itself is one of the Asia’s biggest mosques and has long been at the epicentre of Indian Muslim politics. In Chapter 4, Ahmed focuses on the role of the Shahi Imam, who leads the prayers in the mosque, as a real and symbolic political figure who ties together history, law and memory to render the Jama Masjid a ‘living’ monument and functional religious and political space. Specifically, this chapter relays detailed events at Jama Masjid during the 1975 riot. Even a contemporary visitor to the Jama Masjid Friday zuhr prayers quickly realizes that there is a long history of the Imam dispensing political messages during the Friday khutbah or sermon. This chapter details how the local surrounding Muslim community spontaneously revolted against the administering Wakf board in favour of the Shahi Imam, resulting in violent conflagrations with the local police. The Imam was subsequently arrested and emerged as a major political voice, forming the Jama Masjid Trust that oversaw the affairs of the mosque. During the Babri Masjid dispute, the Jama Masjid was again a site of contestation. Chapter 5 provides a close examination of the Babri Masjid dispute and the very right to heritage in the disputation of the mosque itself and the Ayodhya movement. Because the Babri Masjid still remains a symbol of communalism in modern-day India, it appropriately ties together Ahmed’s thesis. Ahmed provides a detailed background and account of the events and stakes at issue. Most interestingly, the Indian Muslim community initially viewed the Babri Masjid matter as a property dispute, but over time, the mosque became a symbol of collective Muslim resistance involving the most dominant Muslim political forces of the time.
In conclusion, Ahmed persuasively links the right to heritage with a political demand that emerged in the face of radical Islamic politics and Right-wing Hindu forces. Ahmed provides a rich framework and appropriately recognizes the very significant role that monuments play in the discourse on what constitutes ‘Muslim’. Mosques, in particular, play active roles in the Muslim community that transcend spiritual functions and influence day-to-day political life not only in their local, but the national, and at times, pan-Islamic community. A close analysis of the time periods dating back to the colonial era and ending in the late 1980s fills an important void; and this volume possesses a wonderful density of material. While much existing work focuses on an isolated period or event, the long historical period that is covered brings out the continuities and discontinuities of the legal and political discourse. Even where enduring political groupings and actors exist, Ahmed shows that each individual historical moment still has to be considered carefully for its meaning and outcome.
Given what appears like a growing communal divide in present-day India, this book opens the way for further case studies of heritage sites. In particular, I would be interested in an examination of the dargahs or shrines such as Ajmer Sharif and Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah. Ahmed is right to briefly note that dargahs at the grass-roots level are not politically neutral sites either. But given the different role of dargahs in the spiritual life of both Indian Muslims and non-Muslims, it is useful to consider whether these sites could possibly offer a partial contrast to the highly contentious politics of the Jama Masjid or the Babri Masjid. An exploration of dargahs, for example, might potentially advance the scholar Imtiaz Ahmed’s thesis that there is an underlying and inherent pluralism in Indian Islam, and offer new terrains to consider the possibilities for a more genuinely pluralistic Indian society.