Histories, Cultures, Politics: Islam and Muslims in South India
August 17 & 18, 2007
Yet another seminar on Islam/Muslims, we may well ask despairingly; they seem to be held with alarming regularity around the world these days. And it looks as though the more discourse we produce about Muslims and Islam the more our inadequacies – even in providing analytical descriptions – come to light. The thematic unity of this seminar comes from its stress on a particular location, that is, South India. There are many ways in which one can think through the importance of location. One way to approach it is through the problematic of representation, which is to note the under-representation of southern India in discussions and scholarship on Islam and Muslim lives in India, or even South Asia. One may note here that most well-known studies falling broadly in this category, and here we refer to widely circulated and influential research available in English, do in fact claim ‘India’ or ‘South Asia’ as their reference point. A seminar of this sort could base itself entirely on ‘correcting’ this bias of scholarship.
However, a statement of the problem in these terms does not tell us much about the problem itself. A corrective approach may contribute nothing more than interesting historical or anthropological information, adding to an existing body of knowledge, but not much to the theoretical frameworks with which we may approach it. It would also then restrict the many referents of ‘location’. This seminar examines what is at stake in a shift of location, and what some of the ways to think about it might be.
Our attempt in this seminar is to bring together papers by scholars working in different disciplines and at different stages of their research, united by an interest in a) different aspects of Muslim lives and politics in southern India, that is to say, the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and b) historical and contemporary referents of ‘Islam’ specific to the region, but also reflecting on its multiple relationships with the wider national (and international) context.
Anveshi’s history of interdisciplinary research, with important links with different activist groups, is the biggest resource that the idea of the seminar has drawn on. Our diverse disciplinary locations (cultural studies, political science, literature, philosophy) – and here we have another very important referent of ‘location’ – are largely responsible for the thinking that motivates this seminar. We hope to be able to reflect together on the implications of these and other questions that have come up for us – theoretical, methodological – for current and future research on Islam in India. The larger possibility we hope to open up is to think about minority histories, contemporary identities, cultures and dilemmas that have somewhere fallen out of the tight frame of indigeneity/foreignness, modernity/tradition, but also violence and law in which questions relating to Muslims and Islam in India have tended to be posed.
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
Prof Abdul Kalam [Madras University, Chennai]; S. Anvar [Independent Researcher, Chennai]; Dr Neshat Quaiser [Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi]; Prof Janaki Nair [CSSS, Kolkata]; Aisha Farooqi [Osmania University, Hyderabad]; M.A. Moid [Central University, Hyderabad]; B. Venkat Rao [CIEFL, Hyderabad]; Dr Shamshad Hussain [Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit Regional Centre, Malappuram]; Nigar Ataulla [Islamic Voice, Bangalore]; Shefali Jha [Anveshi, Hyderabad]; Sherin B.S. [M.G. University, Kottayam].