Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India

Hilal Ahmed is Associate Professor at CSDS, India. He works on political Islam, Indian democracy and politics of symbols in South Asia. He is the author of A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (2024), Allah Naam ki Siyasat (2023), Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India (2019), Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (With Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, 2019) and Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (2014). He has also edited Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (with Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, 2021), Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues, Debates and Reforms (with R. K. Mishra and K. N. Jehangir, 2022) and Sudipta Kaviraj: A Reader (2023).

‘Hilal Ahmed’s book is a pioneering exploration of the politics of historical monuments, an interdisciplinary work linking the analysis of law, history and politics. It offers a remarkable analysis of the ways in which reinterpreted images of the past work as resources for mobilization and action in the political present. The book also offers a fascinating analysis of the politics around the Jama Masjid in Delhi – showing how religious monuments transform into sites of the political public sphere. Ahmed provides an insightful examination of the construction of historical memory and a sophisticated exploration of the complex effects of democratic mobilization on the political identity of Indian Muslims.’—Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, USA‘What could be more concrete, more singular in meaning than a building? In fact, many different actors have made signage, use, disputation, and rituals have made India’s built past centrally important in defining nationalism and belonging. Citizens absorb the assumptions of national identities as wholly natural, and the historical meanings attached to sites and buildings are part of those identities. Hilal Ahmed’s book provides a fresh and original analysis to understanding cultural and political life in India’s culturally plural society today.’—Barbara Metcalf, Professor of History Emerita, University of California, Davis, USA‘Hilal Ahmed analyses the way in which political groups, both Hindu and Muslim, have used the great monuments of the Indo-Islamic tradition for political mobilisation. His book is one of the most important and innovative pieces of research of recent times. No scholar in the field should ignore it.’—Francis Robinson, Professor of the History of South Asia, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

• List of Figures. List of Tables. Preface to the First Edition. Preface to the Second Edition. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. 2. Monumentalisation in Colonial India: Discovery of ‘Indian Muslim Architectural Heritage’. 3. Monumentalisation in Postcolonial India: Conservation, Law and Muslim Politics. 4. Jama Masjid and the Political Memory of a Royal Muslim Past. 5. Babri Masjid and the Muslim Politics of Right to Heritage. 6. Conclusion. Afterword. Appendices. Select Bibliography. About the Author. Index.