Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India

Front Cover
Mukulika Banerjee
Yoda Press, 2008 - Muslims - 142 pages
In this captivating new volume, 13 anthropologists present a set of vivid portraits of Muslims in India today. Each of the contributors has had a long-term research interest in Muslim societies in India, but in these essays they profile one single individual whom they have met in the course of their research and whose story they found compelling. The subjects of this volume live in different parts of India, like Bhuj, the mountains of Kashmir, Hyderabad, Androth Island, and Lucknow, they speak different languages, eat different foods, are engaged in various kinds of work, but are all Muslim. Zooming in on individuals who have normally stood cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of others in a large canvas, these portraits focus attention on them in a separate frame, revealing their stories, predicaments, and realities, the aspirations they nurture and the impediments they overcome to attempt to achieve these. In doing so, they highlight the sheer diversity which lies hidden under the seemingly homogeneous category of the Indian Muslim, and shatter stereotypes. Intimately told and stripped of jargon, yet nuanced and incisive, this is a valuable addition to the corpus of books on the Muslim community in contemporary India.

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