Revisiting the Minority Imagination: An Inquiry into the Anticaste Pasmanda-Muslim Discourse in India

Abstract

The article explores the emergent tension between the minority imagination and anticaste politics among India’s most significant religious minority, the Muslims. Since the late 1990s, the mobilization of lowered-caste Muslims in the form of the Pasmanda movement has increasingly challenged the hegemony of the so-called high-caste Ashraf Muslims. The nascent Pasmanda counterdiscourse has contested the critical elements of the entrenched Muslim-minority discourse: identity and the religio-cultural, security and interreligious (communal) violence, and equity and affirmative action. The monolithic image of the Muslim community has been dispelled, and the Muslim-minority discourse has been characterized as a machination for preserving and reproducing the Muslim elite interests. The article maps the Pasmanda discourse and locates it as an instance within the evolving literature on the analytical limitations of the concept of minority to address the justice claims of emergent political subjectivities. The Pasmanda contestations present a sharp anomaly to the existing Muslim-minority discourse and indicate a paradigmatic shift.

The Psychomachia of Caste and Psychoanalysis in India

“…Although the subcontinent has been the crossroad of multiple cultures and civilizations (Subrahmanyam 2015), this influx and co-mixing of customs and ideas could not introduce a significant disruption of the caste order. On the contrary, caste spread into all incoming cultures and religions inhabiting the subcontinent (Ansari 2023). However, in modern times this anomaly had to be addressed since it would contradict the idea of national and religious unity of all "Hindus", which the upper castes needed to project for supremacy in the new political structures developing and being negotiated from the later nineteenth century onwards (Dwivedi et al 2021).…”

Pluralization Challenges to Religion as a Social Imaginary: Anti-Caste Contestations of the Muslim Quota in India

“…In contrast to the entrenched emphasis on inter-religious conflict in Muslim politics, wherein the external religious Other, the Hindu majority, is foregrounded, Pasmanda politics has fixed its glance on the internal caste others. In demographic terms, the Pasmanda has been characterized as the majority within the minority, which, in place of vertical solidarity on religious lines, seeks a pan-religious horizontal solidarity of lowered castes and tribes (Ansari 2023). One of the crucial sites of contestation was the reservation (quota) policies in public employment, education, and the legislature.…”

Contemporary ‘Pasmanda’ Leadership and the Hindutva Politics in Uttar Pradesh

“…The importance of the Pasmanda debate within Muslim politics has been recognized by scholars (Alam, 2003, 2007, 2022; Fazal, 2020; Ansari, 2009, 2018, 2023; Levesque & Niazi, 2023). However, the BJP’s proactive outreach towards Pasmanda Muslims being new, not much academic work has been done to analyze it.…”