A shadow nation: The making of Muslim India

Abstract

The ‘Muslim community’ in India emerged during colonial rule as a new kind of sociological category. This emergence was linked to the designs and exigencies of British rule, including the deployment from the early years of the nineteenth century of new forms of classification like the census, which for the first time defined India’s Muslims as a minority. More interesting, however, was the way in which the colonial state provided Muslims the opportunity to redefine themselves as a group. In this chapter, I will argue that rather than being territorialized by British rule as a demographic or religious minority, Muslims adopted forms of selfdefinition that ended up deterritorializing both India and Islam. They did so by abandoning the idea of territorial nationality, which defined them as second-class subjects in a state where they were unfree instead of free, a minority instead of a majority. What resulted from this abandonment of territoriality was a Muslim community that occupied an imagined space situated at an angle to the sovereignty of the state. Like a shadow, this community was spread by the territorial notion of nationality, while at the same time being quite distinct from it.