Overview

This volume explores the issue of minorities in India and how they are identified, defined, and categorized by legal and institutional processes. It examines how modern law creates and conditions minority identity and also how groups manipulate the ground-level situation to project a certain identity at a particular point of time. When more than one category applies to a group, and such categorizations become the basis for the struggle for rights, the politics of identity become even more complex. The volume specifically focuses on 'religious' minorities, questioning the religious identification of groups and showing that the construction of minority groups in religious terms is difficult to achieve given the existence of several, and sometimes contradictory, loyalties and identities. The essays address the minority issue by engaging with different minority communities in India. These also question the relationship of minority identities to caste, gender, and tribal identity. This is the new paperback edition.

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9780199487288

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The volume explores the tenuous and often contentious relationships between minority groups' resoluteness on their cultural peculiarities, the persisting ides of a monolithic nation-state that invariable tends to view difference as deviance. Alongside, it marks a significant departure that many contributors rely on field data to probe the very category of minorities per se?its normative postures, definitional accuracies and propensity towards reifying otherwise fluid identities. The volume suggests that the process of the production of minority and majority identities implicates colonial and post-colonial statecraft, census enumeration, legal pronouncements, and also mobilisations on groundELthe contributions encompass a wide range of subjects, cases and approaches, yet commonality of themes and arguments holds them together. Tanweer Fazal, Contributions to Indian Sociology 50:3 (2016)

The volume explores the tenuous and often contentious relationships between minority groups' resoluteness on their cultural peculiarities, the persisting ides of a monolithic nation-state that invariable tends to view difference as deviance. Alongside, it marks a significant departure that many contributors rely on field data to probe the very category of minorities per se?its normative postures, definitional accuracies and propensity towards reifying otherwise fluid identities. The volume suggests that the process of the production of minority and majority identities implicates colonial and post-colonial statecraft, census enumeration, legal pronouncements, and also mobilisations on ground...the contributions encompass a wide range of subjects, cases and approaches, yet commonality of themes and arguments holds them together. Tanweer Fazal, Contributions to Indian Sociology 50:3 (2016)

Author Information

Rowena Robinson is Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

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