“The twelfth volume of Subaltern Studies comprises essays broadly linked by an interest in the history of Muslims and Dalits in South Asia, or with the manner in which dominant histories in the subcontinent have been ‘fabricated’.
Shahid Amin examines how a persistent image of ‘the Mussalman’ came into being via the work of Hindi writers and publicists in the late nineteenth century. He suggests that this image was not derived from popular memory but conjured up for political deployment. He reveals the enormous mileage gained by this image, both ‘then’ and ‘now’.
M.T. Ansari looks at the history of Mappila peasant ‘uprisings’ in the early twentieth century, and at how these came to be discursively constructed to arrive at an image of the fanatic Mussalman. This then yielded the argument that the Muslim fanatic was a religious fundamentalist who had either to be confined or killed. This essay also thus carries resonances of present-day fabrications of Islam.
Faisal Fatehali Devji’s essay on Gandhi’s politics of friendship offers an interesting counterpoint to the preceding two. Focusing on the Khilafat Movement, it studies friendship in one of Gandhi’s boldest experiments—his attempt to rethink political relations between Hindus and Muslims. In looking at Gandhi as ‘a spoiler within the rhetoric of colonial India’, Devji points implicitly to the importance of Gandhian ideology in contemporary India.”
[Source: Orient Blackswan]
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