The ilaqa syndrome

Book review of Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity

There are few Indians who have not grown up on stereotyped images of where and how Hindus and Muslims live. This typecast image of the “other” extends to how they live, their culinary delights, the team they cheer if Indian and Pakistani teams lock horns in stadia, what goes on in their minds and, most importantly, their politics. Not a homogenous community by any yardstick, they are however, connected by segregated or confined spaces —“homelands” to them.

Some years ago, an American of Gujarati-Muslim origin who stayed on intermittently for several years after being caught in the maelstrom of 2002 post-Godhra riots, hesitatingly asked if I would visit him at “home”, in Ahmedabad’s Juhapura, one of Asia’s largest Muslim ghettos. When the “work” part of our conversation was over, he raised an awkward question. Very few, even friends, he explained, enter the colony when they drop him home late in the evening or night. Most drop him at the edge of the colony before heading back to the city’s Hindu-dominated “safe” zones.

There is a rare city, small town or even village in India without a demarcated zones for India’s largest religious minority, although histories of these have different time spans. Few non-Muslims venture into these and their visualisation of life and space within is formed on the basis of what they grew up believing to be a true depiction.

This book explores the idea of the “Muslim locality” or ilaqa and forcefully argues that spaces where Muslims live are unmistakably and offensively demarcated, just as their identities are based on religious lines. A person is profiled merely on the basis of where she lives. These forced “homelands” are for those who forsook the one carved out from British India and stayed on in “secular” India. The book reminds us repeatedly that these areas have multiple derogatory labels — “mini-Pakistan” being the most common one. It traces the process of these signboards getting affixed on these areas.

The author contends that what began as isolation for Muslims in Delhi in the late nineteenth century later became a pan-India phenomenon. It eventually ended up as exclusion. Delhi is referred as India’s microcosm, but the book also depicts it as a precursor of what was to come. The process started after 1857 when the consolidating colonial state felt the need to penalise Muslims for their role in the uprising.

Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity 

Author: Nazima Parveen

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 311; Price: Rs 1,299

The book examines four urban developments that led to the demarcation of geographical spaces in Delhi, and within India eventually, on religious lines. This progression is over a series of partitions after the one in the sub-continent in 1947 that did not end divergent views of “homeland”. Living spaces in what was then Shahjahanabad is reconstructed. By the 1940s, it had degenerated from being caste-craft and class-based colonies into one drawn solely on the basis of religious identities of the people there.

Partition changed Delhi’s demography as a large number of Hindu and Sikh refugees arrived from Pakistan. Residential spaces within the city were rearranged as numerous Muslims who decided to stay back were forced to seek shelter in separate refugee camps. Different shelters for communities on the two sides of the communal divide highlighted the irony that although the two were united in being targets of similar hatred, religious identities defined their primary character and perceptions of them. With homes either forcibly occupied or allotted to refugees and Muslims forced to move to “safer” areas, the nature of lanes and colonies altered. The walled city of Delhi was divided into Hindu  mohallas,  Muslim ilaqe and the odd mixed colonies.

The final phase of urban development that Ms Parveen notes in the book is that of coerced redevelopment of Muslim localities during the Emergency. It was the state’s “final” push against “mini-Pakistans”, which sharpened threat perception of the state and Hindus in the wake of the two wars in 1965 and 1971 with Pakistan.

But the process continues, witness, for instance, the emergence of colonies beyond the Jamia Millia Islamia in Okhla as the new “mini-Pakistans”.  Yet, the reality is that the “idea of Pakistan turned into a source of collective guilt for the Delhi Muslims who stayed back.” Not just Delhi’s Muslims, but the pressure on others elsewhere too kept increasing with time. Now they are asked to prove their loyalty at every step. Witness, for instance, Ghulam Nabi Azad’s farewell speech listing himself as a proud Indian for being “among those fortunate people who never went to Pakistan.”

The burden of proof has increased on Muslims in recent decades. For “untroubled” lives, they must live up to the imaginations of majoritarian thinking. Minorities are expected to “appear, behave, live, organise, vote or even eat in some particularly nationalistic ways”. The issue of culinary preferences and the politics surrounding consumption of meat, especially of which animal, has returned as a headline point after the recent Delhi municipality’s order making it obligatory for eateries to put notices indicating whether the meat they serve is halal or jhatka. 

Ms Parveen unpeels, layer by layer, issues that are complex but taken as given, forcing readers to reconsider positions on Muslim localities, their practices, preferences and choices.