Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (Paperback or Softback)

This book explores the process of monumentalisation of Indo-Islamic historical places and their remaking as political sites in contemporary India situating these within the Muslim political discourse.

It studies the process through which various monuments such as the Jama Masjid in Delhi and the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya became ‘political sites’ many decades after independence and the modes by which a memory of a royal Muslim past was articulated for political mobilisation. It analyses the histories of these archaeological monuments, their function, their status as living memories and as heritage, emerging Muslim religiosities and the internal configurations of Muslim politics in India. This new edition also explores the aftermath of the Supreme Court verdict of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi land title dispute and the Hindutva politics of heritage.

Raising critical questions such as whether Muslim responses to political questions are homogenous, the book will greatly interest researchers and students of political science, modern Indian history, sociology, as well as the general reader interested in contemporary India.

Hilal Ahmed is Associate Professor at CSDS, India. He works on political Islam, Indian democracy and politics of symbols in South Asia. He is the author of A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (2024), Allah Naam ki Siyasat (2023), Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India (2019), Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (With Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, 2019) and Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (2014). He has also edited Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (with Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, 2021), Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues, Debates and Reforms (with R. K. Mishra and K. N. Jehangir, 2022) and Sudipta Kaviraj: A Reader (2023).