Repetitive Stability of Indian Muslim Identity - An Account from the Majority/Minority Nexus

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Muslims constitute the largest religious minority in contemporary India. During the last two decades the Hindu Right, with its notion of India as an essentially Hindu nation, has imposed grave external pressure on the Muslim population, both in terms of security and self-identification. The emergent political and social assertion of Hindu nationalism has to a large extent managed to alter and reconstitute the meaning of national identity in India. The prolongation of communal depictions of Indian society is, however, not only founded in the rise of Hindu nationalist sentiments, but is synchronously instituted by historic events and state categorisation. Through differentiating Indian society into entities and compartments along a religious axis a specific notion of the majority/minority divide has been installed. The current analysis argues that the state actively sustains a particular reading of the social as epitomised by religion, which it has partly inherited from colonial understandings. By tracing decisive temporal moments since the independence of India the present assessment aim at exposing how the majority/minority nexus has been portrayed and reproduced. It also takes as its objective to understand how Muslim collective identity repeatedly attains stability ...