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