Social science research and popular discourse on 'religion and public life' have gradually moved away from binaries such as communal–secular, tradition–modern, or community–individual. It is now widely recognised that religion and cultural traditions do not simply disappear from public life with economic development. In countries like India, this shift has also been reinforced by the emerging social and political trends where issues relating to citizenship are raised through identity movements of historically deprived categories such as the Dalits, Adivasis, and religious minorities such as the Muslims, for inclusive and just development.
This ‘positive’ view of religion parallels changing attitudes in other parts of the world as well where there is growing interest on religious communities and faith-based organisations and their potential role in enhancing development and service delivery. While this has led to a renewed interest in the study of religion, rigorous social science research on ‘religion and citizenship’ is still at a nascent stage.
This series attempts to fill the gap by bringing together scholarly writing on this important and rapidly expanding area of research in the social sciences.
By Salah Punathil
November 07, 2018
This book examines conflict and violence among religious minorities and the implication on the idea of citizenship in contemporary India. Going beyond the usual Hindu-Muslim question, it situates communalism in the context of conflicts between Muslims and Christians. By tracing the long history of ...
By Anasua Chatterjee
January 23, 2017
Part of the ‘Religion and Citizenship’ series, this book is an ethnographic study of marginality of Muslims in urban India. It explores the realities and consequences of socio-spatial segregation faced by Muslim communities and the various ways in which they negotiate it in the course of their ...
By Nida Kirmani
January 21, 2016
The marginalisation of Muslims in India has recently been the subject of heated public debate. In these discussions, however, Muslim women are often either overlooked or treated as a homogenous group with a common set of interests. Focusing on the narratives of women living in a predominantly ...
By Dipankar Gupta
January 21, 2016
The book explores how Muslims in Mumbai and Ahmedabad coped with the aftermath of the violence directed against them in 1993 and 2002 respectively, and how they responded to the ethnic carnages of which they were the victims, highlighting the importance of the context and the history of the place ...
Edited
By Gurpreet Mahajan, Surinder S. Jodhka
January 21, 2016
By making religious community a relevant category for discussing development deficit, the Sachar Committee Report (that was submitted to the Prime Minister of India in 2007) initiated a new political discourse in India. While the liberal secular framework privileged the individual over the ...
