Minorities in South Asia and in Europe

This book studies minorities of South Asia and Europe in a comparative and transnational perspective. While country-specific studies in minorities are not rare, their comparisons within a region (like South Asia and Europe) or across them are almost non-existent. This is so because the history of the formation of minorities in many ways coincides with that of the formation of nation-states in both these regions. As modern states emerge and their boundaries are drawn in fairly neat and precise terms, minorities are created if not trapped and colonized within them. International boundaries have often been drawn in postcolonial South Asia or in post-war Europe in ways that have not only dismembered the hitherto homogeneous groups into minorities, dispersed over two or more nation-states, but also brought about newer sources of division amongst them. Minorities, as we will see, are minorities only with reference to the national body within which they constitute themselves as minorities. Modern minorities are the product of nationalist discourse. For, it is in relation to that body that one is a majority or for that matter a minority. Many of the minorities, whether in South Asia or in Europe, live in a state of virtual statelessness, and they face extreme violence. Violence is exercised more often than not in collusion with the instruments of the state that aims not only to denigrate citizenship rights of these minority groups but to eliminate and exterminate them altogether. Thus extreme violence creates a nation without minorities. If minorities are not rendered effectively stateless, they are forced to assimilate themselves into the national mainstream.

Samir Kumar Das is professor of political science, University of Calcutta.