Muslims and others: anecdotes,fragments, and uncertainties of evidence |
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| Authors: | Rustom Bharucha |
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| Abstract: | Abstract Against the intensified communalization of civil society and the emergence of new modes of racism in contemporary India, this essay juxtaposes different histories of the Other through critical insights into the construction and demonization of the Indian Muslim. Working through anecdotes and fragments, bits and pieces of history, this disjunctive discourse on the Other attempts to trouble liberal assumptions of cultural identity by calling attention to the uncertainties of evidence by which ethnic identities are politicized in diverse ways. While critiquing the exclusionary mode of 'othering', the essay also calls attention to more internalized modes of disidentification and the double-edged benefits of political identity for the underprivileged and dispossessed, whose own assertions of the self invariably complicate official identitarian constructions. The enigmas of the self are perhaps most vivid in the brutal evidence of genocide, where the apparent 'dead certainty' of killing the Other has been interpreted as a means of making 'persons out of bodies' (Arjun Appadurai). Countering this position, the essay argues that ethnic violence is facilitated by the 'dead certainty' of (in)justice, reinforced by the 'banality of violence' legitimized through state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. |
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| Keywords: | Muslim Other community communalism ethnicity political identity genocide violence evidence |
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