Governance and Marginality: Politics of Belonging, Citizenship, and Claim-­Making in the Muslim Neighborhoods of Mumbai

• Main Author: Dhaka-Kintgen, Ujala
• Other Authors: Subramanian, Ajantha
• Language: en_US
• Published: Harvard University 2013
• Subjects: Cultural anthropology; South Asian studies; Citizenship; Governmentality; Islam; Minority Identities; Political Anthropology; South Asia
• Online Access: http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10699; http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10406356

This dissertation analyzes how governance and community-based politics of claims in marginalized Muslim neighborhoods of Mumbai are continually reconfigured in relation to one another. By tracing this relationship, I problematize conceptualizations of governmental forms and community that don't adequately attend to their co-constitution in practice. More specifically, I examine the intersections between state practices and claims of belonging in Mumbai neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims who, impelled by regional economic inequalities, immigrated to the city from North India and other parts of the country. A large number of them traditionally belong to artisanal communities and are today engaged in the informal sector of the economy. I am interested in understanding how competing and converging claims are made to locality, urban space, labor, and caste in the interactions between these working-class Muslim communities and the state in a city that has become highly segregated along religious and regional lines. I argue that state and marginalized community in minoritized areas are not defined by independence and isolation, but by a relationship of co-generation marked by convergence and contradiction. My analysis of the interactions between community forms and state practices explores modes of laying claim to localizing forms of belonging with respect to urban space, public religiosity, histories of labor, kinship, and 'backward' caste politics. === Anthropology