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- Convenors:
-
Raphael Susewind
(University of Oxford)
Beatrice Jauregui (University of Toronto)
- Discussant:
-
Nandini Gooptu
(University of Oxford)
- Location:
- 13M12
- Start time:
- 25 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Contemporary Lucknow oscillates between cosmopolitan past and provincial present, melancholy and aspirations, political centrality and economic decline. We assemble scholars in different career stages who recently completed fieldwork in Lucknow to chart the trajectories of the contemporary city.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary Lucknow abounds in contradictions: cosmopolitan for centuries yet thoroughly provincial, melancholic for a past long gone while bustling with aspirations, central to Indian politics but sidelined in narratives of "development". The city attracts many historians and some political scientists, but scholarship has long ignored its contemporary social life; most accounts end in the 1970s.
Our panel thus assembles young scholars in different career stages who have recently completed fieldwork in and on Lucknow to chart the trajectories of the contemporary city. Bringing disciplinary diversity to an object overwhelmingly represented through historical accounts, we seek to reorient debates on South Asian cities with fresh empirical and theoretical insights from Lucknow. We revise the rich historiography of Lucknow in light of conceptual developments of "the city," even as we enrich urban theory by grounding it in local history. Some of us have met or collaborated earlier, others joined us for this specific project: to place contemporary Lucknow firmly within the growing literature on lower-tier Indian cities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Mengia Hong Tschalaer (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the manners by which Lucknow-based Muslim women’s rights activists carefully orchestrate their public appearance through their bodily performance in order to carve out space for themselves in the public sphere and within the legal landscape.
Paper long abstract:
Within the last decade, Muslim women's rights activists in postcolonial India have acquired increasing visibility. This paper analyses the strategies by which the presidents and founding members of Lucknow's three biggest Muslim women organizations, namely the All India Muslim Women's Personal Law Board and the Indian Muslim Women's Movement (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan) and the Women's Club (Bazme Khawateen), engage with the complex heterogeneous legal landscape in order to carve out space for themselves in the public sphere and within the legal landscape. It looks at the manners by which Muslim women's rights activists carefully orchestrate their public appearance through their bodily performance, and utilise the media in the staging of their imaginaries concerning the 'true Islam' and the 'ideal Muslim woman', within the public space. This article argues that Muslim women's rights activists' increasing visibility in the public space contributes to the emergence of finely crafted and complex socio-legal spaces for women's rights activists. These spaces offer room for Muslim women's rights activists to destabilise hegemonic patterns of knowledge and authority and to produce alternative discourses on gender in Islam. Laying bare the possibilities Islamic discourse and its embodiment offer for women's agency, this paper challenges liberal and modernist perspectives that view religion as being obstructive to women's freedom and autonomy.
Saiyed Hasnain (University of Lucknow)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the emergence of the All India Shia Muslim Personal Law Board, this paper deals with factional politics among Shias of Lucknow. This factionalism has a pan India bearing on Muslim politics in general and Shia politics in particular.
Paper long abstract:
Lucknow has long been the centre of Shia culture and politics in South Asia. Even after they lost political authority in 1857, Shias continued to influence, though in much decreased degree, the economy and polity in Lucknow till independence in 1947 after which they were marginalised. In the new democratic set up political parties favoured the majority Sunnis because of electoral interests.
When the ulema of Nadwa seminary, Lucknow, established the All India Muslim Personal Law Board in 1973, Shias and other sects were also given representation to present it as a representative body of Muslims. Right from the beginning the office of vice-chairman was given to a Shia religious leader. Uptill now, this position was given to the ulema of a particular family since they were seen as moderates vis a vis sectarian differences. This resulted in resentment among other Shia ulema who felt left out leading to the formation of a separate Shia Personal Board in 2005. The key pretext was that the Shia problems and issues were neglected in the Muslim Personal Law Board. It was formed under the leadership of a prominent Shia moulvi of Lucknow who mobilised the Shia ulema of the country and coopted them in this body. This development is deeply enmeshed in the local factional politics of the Shias.
The proposed paper deals with the factional politics of the Shias of Lucknow which has a pan India bearing on Muslim politics in general and Shia politics in particular.
Stefanie Strulik (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,Geneva)
Paper short abstract:
The paper starts with giving an overview of the transformation of the Muslim middle class in Lucknow under globalization in recent years. It moves on to delineating how narrative and performative aspects of middleclassness are tied to a new economic nationalism and discourses on Indian modernity.
Paper long abstract:
The last decade has seen an increased interest the "phenomenal rise of the Indian middle class". With economic liberalization since the 1990s, the entering of multinationals into the Indian market and the simultaneous process of a rapidly growing transnational media and consumption culture "new economies of desire" have developed. Boundaries between 'traditional India' and the 'modern West' have been broken down and a new national self-image as a modern global player has emerged. Public Indian discourses typically make a correlation between the growing middle class and the national pride of modern India. While increasing consumer choices, and western connoted values are important symbolic markers of middle class membership, the latter is linked to an expressive and confident affirmation of "Indianness" which is primarily oriented around a Hindu India. Taking the hype over the growing Indian middle class as a point of departure, the paper will questions this tacit equation of the middle class and Hindu Indian modernity and draws attention to the Muslim middle class. The paper, which is based on fieldwork in Lucknow, starts with giving an overview of the transformation of the Muslim middle class in Lucknow under globalization in recent years. It moves on to delineating how narrative and performative aspects of middleclassness are tied to a new economic nationalism and discourses on Indian modernity. A focus on the multipolar transnational references in knowledge production tries to trace the entangledness of competing narratives of modernity and middleclassness in India and within Muslim middle class in Lucknow in particular.
Raphael Susewind (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
One spark of violence, multiple readings: the "Wazirganj terror attack" of January 16, 2013, highlights how both vernacularized "democracy" and religious idioms are instrumental in transforming local political economies which rest on implicit (and at times explicit) violence.
Paper long abstract:
Lucknow, January 17, 2013 (Lucknow Shia News): a Shia mourner and a Hindu follower of Imam Husain were martyred late last night at Imambara Deputy Sahib when Wahabi terrorists fired indiscriminately at a Majlis.
Lucknow, January 19, 2013 (Indian Express): a land developer and a bystander were shot dead in what sources described to be a business rivalry in the old town.
Lucknow, January 21, 2013 (Dainik Jagran): yesterday, the state government appointed a Special Investigation Team to probe the attack in Wazirganj which sparked unrest throughout the old city, since many high-profile persons have been named in the FIRs.
One spark of violence, multiple readings: the "Wazirganj terror attack" highlights the complexity of urban North India's contemporary political, economic and religious transformations. After the murderous attack and subsequent sectarian skirmishes, demonstrations were staged, politicians arrested, and religious gatherings reinvigorated. This paper discusses the political and economic micro setting of Wazirganj, its steady religious transformation over the last decades and the social positioning of key actors in order to contextualize the event. It highlights how both vernacularized "democracy" and religious idioms are instrumental in transforming local political economies - economies which nonetheless rest on implicit (and at times explicit) violence.
Christopher Taylor (Boston University)
Paper short abstract:
In contemporary India, however, religious knowledge is increasingly sidelined within politics and education. Yet the vibrancy of Lucknow's religious sphere adds nuance to the facile notion that ‘ulama must adopt “modern” syllabi or must succumb to the government's madrasa reforms to remain relevant.
Paper long abstract:
Lucknow is world-famous for Islamic intellectual production. The city produced the 'ulama of Firangi Mahal, the Sunni seminary Darul 'Uloom Nadwat ul 'Ulama, and the revival and consolidation of a distinctly Indian Shi'ism. In contemporary India, however, religious knowledge is increasingly sidelined within politics and education. Today's news media laments madrasa education's obscurantism, decrying its declining "usefulness" in the 21st century. Yet a view of madrasas as deliberately cloistered spaces, impervious to new trends in contemporary life, is misleading. This paper follows the lives of students and graduates of Nadwa, from their classrooms and hostels to pulpits and office-buildings, taking an analytical view of Nadwa as an integral part of the Lucknow urban milieu. I evaluate intellectual life at the madrasa, but I particularly highlight its place within the sociological landscape: its influence in Lucknowi social circles and ability to maintain prestige (and Saudi funding) amidst 21st century constraints. As clamor over "Muslim backwardness" and poverty becomes more shrill in recent years, this madrasa claims a key role in social mobility, on account of the free housing and education provided to thousands of students. This paper views the religious sphere in Lucknow as a marketplace for positions in scholarship and commnuity leadership as well as a site in the transnational economy of charity. The vibrancy of Lucknow's religious sphere adds nuance to the facile notion that 'ulama must adopt "modern" syllabi or must succumb to the government's madrasa reforms (Sikand 2005) in order to remain relevant.
Melia Belli (University of Texas at Arlington)
Paper short abstract:
Between 2000-2012, Mayawati, UP's female dalit Chief Minister, erected monumental statues of dalit activists, including herself, throughout Lucknow. This paper examines the statues’ communal and propagandistic functions.
Paper long abstract:
Monumental bronze and marble statues of social reformers from the historically oppressed "untouchable" (dalit) caste have become a major feature of Lucknow's urban fabric over the past decade. Now in Lucknow public statues of celebrated dalits stand beside those of middle and upper caste Indian heroes, such as Gandhi and Rana Pratap. The Lucknow dalit statues were commissioned by Mayawati, the state's former dalit female Chief Minister. The statues are arranged in groups in chronological order and include dalit communal heroes such as Ambedkar and Mayawati's political predecessor, Kanshi Ram. The cycles conclude with Mayawati's own image, making her one of the few in Indian history to commission their own public statues.
Despite their ubiquity and uniqueness, my work represents the first critical study of Mayawati's pubic statues. Based on interviews I conducted in 2010-11 with Mayawati's artists and dalits throughout the state, I consider the statues' polysemic meanings, focusing on gender and subalternity. Their scale, permanent construction materials, and prominence secure the dalits a place in Indian history- not just in the present, but for the future. I also argue that the statues serve Mayawati's political agenda. Their sequence establishes Mayawati as Ambedkar and Kahshi Ram's political heir, thus legitimizing her authority. This is reaffirmed through the statues' iconography, which presents her as powerful, wealthy, and androgynous. This self-image was perhaps necessary as Mayawati's caste and gender make her twice a minority in Indian politics and thus doubly compel her to commission monumental politically-charged public works of art.
Joel Lee (Williams College)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers both the erosion and the persistence of plural religious practice among the Dalit castes that supply the city’s sanitation labor.
Paper long abstract:
As Sandria Freitag, Mushirul Hasan and others have demonstrated, the religiously composite culture for which Lucknow was once widely known was dramatically eroded, if not lost altogether, by the political ruptures and interreligious violence of the twentieth century. A tradition of deep participation in both Hindu and Muslim practices perdures, however, among those Dalit castes that supply the city's municipal and private sanitation labor: Balmikis, Lal Begis, Dhanuks and Jallads. This is not a matter merely of observing both Hindu and Muslim public holidays, but of plural naming practices, marriage and death rites; of a religiously composite caste habitus that destabilizes sociological commonsense and pervades everyday life. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork among sanitation workers and their families, considers the ramifications of living plurally in an age of religious singularity: of getting admitted to university when you are Jagdish, son of Ahmad, of going to work when you are Saliman, daughter of Ram. Despite the valorization, in the public sphere, of the ideal of composite culture and of Lucknow's unique claim to it, those who continue to bear the intimate signs of such a culture frequently experience this heritage as a burden that only compounds the stigma of untouchability.