Analyzing Religious Narratives And Practices Of Diverse Groups Of Muslims in Old Delhi

Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India by Kalyani Devaki Menon looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. An excerpt:

While my eating practices may have made it easier for Old Delhi Muslims to  relate to me, there were many other points of difference that marked me as an  oddity in Old Delhi and have undoubtedly shaped this project in important ways.  Indeed, I was viewed with suspicion by many for a variety of reasons. As a researcher with a Hindu name, one of the first questions I was often asked was  “Why are you interested in studying Muslims?” While I had a well-considered explanation of how a project on the ways that religious minorities negotiate the  exclusionary landscapes created by the Hindu right was a natural extension of  my previous work on women in the multiple wings of the Sangh Parivar in New Delhi, such justifications were not convincing to all my interlocutors. This is not surprising given that Indian Muslims have to contend with anti-Muslim prejudice and discrimination in their everyday lives in Hindu-majoritarian India. My Hindu name positioned me within a privileged majority that is not only construed as the normative national subject but is also implicated in the multiple  alienations that Indian Muslims experience today. Being a researcher with a Hindu name based in the United States only compounded the issue for some.  Given the abiding, and not unwarranted, belief among my interlocutors that the  United States does not like Muslims, some wondered whether my presence had  a more insidious purpose. Was I a spy? Would I write negative things about Muslims that could create more problems for them? Had it not been for women like  Farhana Baji and Zehra Baji, and men like Iqbal Sahib and Raza Sahib, whose generous embrace established me as a trustworthy person among different  groups, I might have had a much more difficult time conducting my research. Being a woman in Old Delhi also shaped my experience and this project in  particular ways. Many of my female interlocutors did not socialize with men who  were not natal kin. Some kept very strict purdah (veiling), donning burqas and  hijabs outside the home and maintaining various degrees of physical distancing  and/or seclusion. Others did not veil in any obvious sense but often maintained  forms of distancing and regulation that, as Patricia Jeffery notes, is common to  women of all religions in many parts of North India (2000, 6). In this context,  being a female researcher meant that women were able to bring me to their homes  and share their lives and worlds with me in ways that would have been difficult,  and in many cases impossible, had I been a male researcher. But it also meant  that my relationships with men were more formal and circumscribed. While  I could meet women in their homes, I generally met men in their places of work  or, less frequently and usually in the company of others, the male domains of  the home. While I could have more casual interactions with the brothers and  sons of women I met in their homes, I had very formal interactions with their  husbands, and with men I met outside the familial context. I could “hang out”  with women more easily, accompanying them as they went about their daily lives  at home, in the market, at religious events, and as they visited each other. This  enabled a more familiar relationship with them. I could not have such a familiar relationship with men, or “hang out” with them in the same way without violating etiquette in Old Delhi. This is reflected in this book in the fact that I call  a lot more women baji (sister) than I call men bhai (brother), using instead the  more distancing, and deferential, sahib (sir). However, despite the more circumscribed nature of my interactions, I did develop close relationships with some  men, such as Raza Sahib and Iqbal Sahib, who were older and forged a paternal  relationship with me. 

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While being a woman affected my interactions and relationships with people,  being a female researcher meant that I violated many gender norms in Old Delhi.  I lived alone without a husband or parental figure, I traveled all over Delhi on  my own, and I talked with men and women without the usual inhibitions. Reflecting gender expectations across religious groups in India, even more odd was  the fact that I had no children despite having been married for well over a de cade. This triggered several embarrassing (for me) and hilarious (for them) con versations among women, replete with graphic hand gestures, about how to have  intercourse to ensure conception. That childlessness could be a choice was inconceivable to many, except for Zehra Baji, who once rescued me from an inquisitive  male relative by telling him off curtly, “What will she do with children? She has  her work to do. If she had a child it would do potty and susu in the middle of the interview and then how could she work? She will have to run after the  child.” She paused and added, “I’ve told her to have a child and give it to me. That  way she can work and I will raise the child.” A woman with no formal schooling  and who could not read or write (apart from Arabic to read, but not understand,  the Quran), Zehra Baji eloquently summarized not just the gendered struggles of  the female academic everywhere but also the informal labor of others, often differently positioned in terms of race, class, caste, religion, gender, and age, that  enables their work. 

Although I may have cut an odd figure in Old Delhi, and some kept their dis tance, most Muslims I worked with in Old Delhi welcomed me into their  homes, showered me with hospitality, and tolerantly allowed me to impose on  their everyday lives. They did not expect me to be like them, but at the same time,  women especially schooled me patiently on norms they expected me to follow.  For instance, I was gently told how to conduct myself at various religious events,  or less gently told how to dress for weddings when they found my attire sadly  lacking. As an anthropologist learning about everyday life in Old Delhi, I found  these conversations very productive. Other things made me uncomfortable but  were still ethnographically interesting—such as offers to straighten my very curly  hair or comments that equated beauty with fairness—revealing prejudices shared  by people of all religions in India, where standards of beauty are inflected with  racial hegemonies. 

Yet, and perhaps this is the essential point in a book that seeks to take  Visweswaran’s “cultural commons” seriously, my difference was never a point  of exclusion or a source of discrimination or danger. People looked out for me,  cared for me, and respected me in ways I had not expected, including those  people I did not know and who did not know me. Even strangers who first met  me alone at night on the ninth of Muharram at Panja Sharif Dargah near Kashmiri Gate looked out for me, insisting that I sit with their family during the over night commemorations and dropping me home after fajr namaz (morning  prayers) that day and the next (Ashura).20 Indeed, having conducted fieldwork  since 1999 in different parts of the National Capital Region (Old Delhi, New  Delhi, and parts of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan) infamous for sexual harassment and gendered violence, I felt safer walking the lanes and by-lanes  of Old Delhi at all hours, especially in the Muslim areas that bustle with activity till late into the night, than anywhere else in this very unsafe city.

Excerpted with permission from Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India by Kalyani Devaki Menon published by HarperCollins India.

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