This important work analyses the current condition of India’s polity and its relationship with Muslims. It also provides new information on India’s Muslims before and after Independence. Professor Hasan looks at the origins of Muslim separatism under the British, at the making of partition, and at the meanings of these for a host of Muslim communities, families and individuals. His book examines the establishment of the ‘Nehruvian consensus’ — with its secular vision for India’s future — in the 1940s and 1950s, and delineates secular identities as well as the Muslim organizations which ran counter to this process. Mushirul Hasan illustrates the role of Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia as bearers of the ‘beacon lights’ of modern and secular understandings of the Muslim future in India. He then examines the break-up of the Nehruvian consensus from the 1960s through to the present, focussing in particular on the reasons for the growth of communal activity and the retreat of both Hindus and Muslims into communal, political camps. Finally the book syrveys the state of India’s Muslims in the period after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Professor Hasan believes that there still exists a secular platform in India, even if this has been somewhat narrowed. He argues for its importance at the current conjuncture, when the specture of a suppposed ‘Islamic menace’ has globally created a sharp civilizational divide. Professor Hasan’s moderate and modernist voice will help build bridges in these difficult times, when positions have hardened and battle lines drawn.
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