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Taken as a whole, Muslims, India’s
largest religious minority, are, as numerous studies have shown,
among the most economically deprived and educationally backward
sections of Indian society. This is particularly the case in
northern and eastern India, where the bulk of the Muslim
population is concentrated. That the country as a whole cannot
prosper if such a large section of its population remains mired in
poverty and illiteracy should be obvious—even if it actually is
not—to both policy-makers as well as Muslim community leaders
alike.
The causes of Muslim backwardness are multiple. Some are rooted in
history, while others are related to contemporary factors, such as
discrimination on the part of agencies of the state and the wider
society as well as the neglect of Muslim leaders of Muslim
substantive interests—such as economic and educational
empowerment—and an overwhelming focus on emotive, identity-related
and religious concerns instead.
While much has been written on the factors behind Indian Muslim
backwardness, much of this has taken the form of broad
generalisations based on quantitative studies using statistical
methods. Although useful, such studies lack the advantage of
micro-level studies that highlight qualitative aspects related to
daily life and experiences, without which the actual experiences
of deprivation, in all its nuances, are completely lost. This
book, a joint venture by noted social critic Jeremy Seabrook and
Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, who reports for the Kolkata-based daily
Telegraph, is a pioneering attempt to unravel various little-known
dimensions of Muslim deprivation and anti-Muslim discrimination
using an ethnographic approach that foregrounds qualitative
experiences to embellish its basic argument. Immensely rich in
field-based insights, the book is based on dozens of in-depth
interviews with Muslim respondents living in some of the most
deprived and poverty-stricken slums, or what its title terms as
‘Muslim ghettos’, in Kolkata, a city known for its endemic
poverty. Although the book is thus only about a single, although
important, Indian metropolis, the insights that it generates are
of far wider relevance for other parts of India. What it tells us
about the forms, dimensions and causes of Muslim deprivation as
well as the limited efforts, by Muslim leaders and by agencies of
the state, to address such deprivation, applies, with some
difference in nuance, to much of the rest of India. In that sense,
it depicts life in the numerous ‘Muslim ghettos’ across India in a
fairly honest manner.
Muslims, the book notes, account for a fourth of Kolkata’s
population, but are heavily overrepresented among the city’s poor.
They, along with Dalits, form the bulk of the inhabitants in the
city’s infamous slums. Many of these Muslims are originally from
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, descendants of migrants who were drawn to
the city in search of employment, generally as manual labourers.
The Muslim-inhabited slums the book surveys—Topsia, Beniapukur,
Tangra and Tijala—are uniformly characterised by endemic poverty,
and soaring rates of under-employment and unemployment. The vast
majority of their denizens are manual labourers, many of them
former artisans now unemployed because of the invasion of
‘globalisation’ that has rendered the traditional crafts that they
were engaged in for centuries useless and economically unviable.
Being Muslim, it is often hard for these people to find
‘respectable’ employment outside the small Muslim-based economy.
Even domestic servants sometimes have to adopt a Hindu name in
order to get work. Pathetic levels of education, added to
widespread and deep-rooted anti-Muslim sentiment, make it
difficult for the denizens of the slums to gain any sort of
employment other than as manual labourers, such as
vegetable-sellers, porters, rickshaw pullers, scavengers, and even
petty thieves and smugglers.
Crime and drugs flourish under the nose of the conniving police in
the slums. The slum dwellers live under constant threat of
eviction, by ‘developers’ and land sharks. Life is short, nasty
and brutal, particularly for women, who are almost wholly
illiterate and at the mercy of their menfolk. Disease is rampant
and often people simply cannot afford the ever-increasing costs of
medical treatment. There are almost no medical facilities in the
slums, in any case.
In contrast to caste Hindu localities, the Muslim-dominated slums,
the book notes, enjoy miserably low levels of public service
provisioning—schools, drains, electricity, drinking water,
hospitals and so on. This indicates consistent indifference to
Muslims on the part of the authorities of the state although West
Bengal had, when the book was written, lived under uninterrupted,
decades-long rule of the Left Front that styled itself as the
champion of the proletariat and of religious and ethnic
minorities. This indicates, Seabrook and Siddiqui persuasively
argue, that the Left Front, for all its ‘progressive’ claims,
cared little for Muslim empowerment, or for that of the Dalits and
other such marginalised groups, thus revealing it to be no
different from other ‘mainstream’ political forces in this regard.
The authors cite numerous interviewees who complain of pervasive
anti-Muslim prejudice in the wider society and at the hands of the
authorities, thus questioning the belief that West Bengal is
somehow different from or better than other states when it comes
to how minorities are treated.
Through interviews with a number of Muslims, men and women, the
authors bring out the fact that although West Bengal had been
spared anti-Muslim violence for decades now, the self-styled
‘Communist’ government simply used Muslims as a vote-bank, doing
little for their development. (This certainly has something to do
with the recent dismal failure of the Left Front at the polls).
The Muslim localities surveyed in the book are deliberately, the
authors claim, denied developmental funds. Several innocent Muslim
men living in such slums have also been arrested by the police and
charged with terrorist offences.
The book can be called a chronicle of an unrelenting tale of woe,
for it argues that life for Muslims in these slums is sheer hell,
with absolutely nothing to redeem it. This might well be true, of
course, and overall the book certainly holds out little hope for
the hapless denizens of these slums, who seem condemned to their
conditions simply on account of their religion, their poverty and
their abysmal levels of education. In that sense, the book
certainly does portray the reality of life in Muslim ghettos as
they really and indeed are. But it does not stop there, however.
Based on the experiences of these slum-dwellers the book makes
claims for Muslims in general that critics might regard as
somewhat problematic and exaggerated. It seems to suggest that
Muslims throughout Kolkata, West Bengal and even India at large,
suffer the same predicament as these hapless, poverty-ridden
denizens of Kolkata’s Muslim ghettos—a claim that has little to
back it, and only further reinforces Muslim perceptions of
victimization without offering any hope to ameliorate their
conditions.
While thick in description and providing a chilling account of
what it means to be poor and a Muslim in ‘shining India’, the book
is definitely one-sided in its analysis of Muslim deprivation. It
appears to locate such deprivation almost entirely in terms of
anti-Muslim discrimination, on the part of the agencies of the
state and the wider (or Hindu) society. While this factor cannot
at all be denied in any honest appraisal of Muslim backwardness,
it is not the sole factor—unlike what the authors, echoing Muslim
ideologues who never tire of spinning conspiracy theories and
seeking to blame others for all the ills of the Muslims, argue.
Admittedly, anti-Muslim discrimination does exist but, surely, its
roots need to be understood rather than being summarily dismissed
as sheer and unfounded prejudice. It is not that all perceptions
of communities about each other are without any basis. If this
point is recognised and admitted—which the authors seem to
summarily dismiss—this opens spaces for communities to change
their attitudes and behaviours towards each other for their own
benefit. Simply bemoaning the fact of discrimination, as the
authors do, in an accusatory fashion rules out the much-needed
task of introspection and internal reform that many progressive
Muslim scholars urge if Muslims are to pull themselves out of the
morass that they find themselves stuck in.
In assessing the pathetic conditions of the Muslims in the slums
of Kolkata, and laying the blame for this mainly on factors
external to the Muslim community, the authors conveniently ignore
the role of Muslim political and religious leaders in reinforcing
Muslim backwardness and ‘self-exclusion’ and their doing precious
little to address the question of Muslim poverty and illiteracy.
At a time when the state is rapidly withdrawing from the social
sector, it is for community leaders to take the initiative in
setting up institutions and engaging in practical work to help
their communities advance economically, socially, culturally and
educationally. By leaving out of their analysis the role of Muslim
community leaders in perpetuating Muslim backwardness—by their
simply doing little, if anything, to help their co-religionists
whom they claim to represent, and by focussing their energies, and
that of their community, mainly on issues related to religion and
identity and ignoring substantive real-world issues—the authors
leave out an important explanatory factor for Muslim backwardness
that makes their book one-sided and certainly incomplete.
Another major limitation of the book is its complete silence on
what can be called Muslim ‘self-exclusion’, a factor which is
central to the phenomenon of Muslim marginalisation. Such
self-exclusionary trends, rooted in notions of Muslim difference,
communal supremacism and cultural separatism, gain support from
certain dominant understandings of Islam that are predicated on
creating and constantly stressing distinctions between Muslims and
others, thus ruling out possibilities for healthy inter-community
interaction. Inevitably, this further reinforces Muslim
backwardness as well as anti-Muslim prejudice. As sociologists
point out, religion indelibly impacts on social behaviour and
attitudes and even sometimes determines the economic and
educational choices of individuals and entire communities. How
dominant understandings of Islam among the Muslim slum-dwellers of
Kolkata relate to their pathetic conditions as well as, if at all,
their struggles to overcome such debilitating circumstances, is,
however, completely left out of the analysis by the authors, which
further reduces the value of the book in terms of accounting for
Muslim backwardness.
The book also overlooks the crucial role of caste in accounting
for and reinforcing overall Muslim backwardness. Presumably, the
bulk of the denizens of the slums the book surveys are ‘low’ caste
Muslims (who, taken together, form the bulk of the Indian Muslim
population). Ignoring totally the caste factor, the authors fail
to realise that the pathetic poverty of their respondents might
owe not just to their Muslim-ness and to anti-Muslim prejudice but
also to their caste background. Their backwardness thus probably
owes to a host of factors other than, and in addition to, those
that the authors recount, including ‘upper’ caste Muslim
indifference to the conditions of their ‘low’ caste
co-religionists, a stance that has long historical roots.
Overall, however, and despite these glaring lapses, this book is a
must-read, brutally shattering the myth of the ‘Indian
developmental miracle’ by providing a view from below.
Yoginder Sikand is a
Sociologist & Critic. He works with the Centre for the Study of
Social Exclusion at the National Law School, Bangalore. He can be
reached at
ysikand@gmail.com
Name of the Book:
People Without History: India’s Muslim Ghettos
Authors: Jeremy Seabrook & Imran Ahmed Siddiqui
Published by: Navayana Publishing, New Delhi
Year: 2011
Pages: 257
Price: Rs. 295
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