Book review: Nazima Parveen, Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230231204671 |
| Author | Shruti Dubey |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
346 Book Reviews
Nazima Parveen, Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021,
311 pages, `1,299.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230231204671
This book acquires a special relevance in the contemporary political context in India, in which issues of
identity, citizenship and belongingness of the Muslim minorities are being fiercely debated due to the
pervasive majoritarian nationalism of Bhartiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance. The book
deals with one of the significant characteristics of this marginalization—that is of forced spatial segregation
experienced by Muslims in urban areas. While there is an extensive body of scholarship discussing the
ghettoization of Muslims in Indian cities (by Laurent Bayer, Chistopher Jafferelot, Ghazala Jamil and
Kalyani Menon Sen, among others), they are usually interested in studying the factors for ghettoization and
trajectories of marginalization faced by Muslims. Therefore, they either take the category of ‘Muslim
localities’ as a given, or if they allude to them as being historically constructed, they do not justify the term
with detailed historical evidence. Parveen’s work is a valuable addition to this scholarship precisely because
it addresses both these gaps in two ways: first, by providing a genealogy of the term ‘Muslim locality’ and
tracing how they became contested and associated with various negative significations such as ‘backward’,
‘unhygienic’ and ‘internal threat to security of India’ at different historical junctures; and second, by looking
at the history of Shahjahanabad over a long period of time, using rich archival material as well as oral
history narratives from the early nineteenth century to the late 1970s to make the larger argument that
‘Muslim localities’ are discursively constituted political entities.
Parveen’s core argument is that the objectification of ‘Muslim locality’ and its culture can be
understood in terms of the spatial governmentality of both the colonial and post-colonial states that were
engaged in the processes of what she calls the communalization of space and identity. Parveen identifies
four moments in history (each with a chapter), through which communal demarcation of space and
cultural practices occurred in the city of Shahjahanabad. The first moment is that of 1857 revolt when the
caste/craft-based shared mohallas were converted into religion-based segregated Hindu–Muslim pockets
by the colonial state. The next three moments, shaped through what Parveen calls ‘the discourse of
homeland’, referring to the demand of separate territory for specific communities, were: dealing with the
emergence of two-nation theory in the 1940s, the arrival of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan and
the internal displacement of Muslims in the 1950s and 1960s, and the clearance and resettlement of
Muslim areas during the Emergency of 1975–1976.
Each of the themes elaborated in these chapters has been explored as an independent idea in earlier
works by other scholars. This is true for the reorganization of Shahjahanabad on communal lines
(Narayani Gupta and Michael Mann); contesting notions of homeland in the late colonial period (Shekhar
Bandopadhyay and Ayesha Jalal); partition, internal displacement of Muslims and their segregation in
refugee camps (Joya Chatterjee); and the selective targeting of Muslim majority areas for clearance and
resettlement during emergency on the pretext of beautification in Delhi (Emma Tarlo). The novelty of
this work lies in using this diverse material to make an argument about the production and consolidation
of the category of ‘Muslim locality’ over a long period of time and challenging the naturalness of negative
significations associated with it.
The strength of this book is in providing a multi-scalar analysis that shows how political discourses at
the national as well as international levels impact events at neighbourhood levels in cities. Parveen deftly
shows how the urban becomes the theatre in which the drama of colonialism, nationalism and post-colonial
governance of minorities is enacted. Thus, the colonial understanding of India as what the author calls a
‘battleground of communities’ led to the enumeration of the population on the basis of religion, and
communal electorates in municipal elections became the reason for identification of neighbourhood wards
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