Minority Studies (OIP)

Rowena Robinson is Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction, Rowena Robinson1. India and the Concept of a Multinational Federation, Michel Seymour2. Making Minority Identities: Gender, State, and Muslim Personal Law, Rina Verma Williams3. Scheduled Castes, Christians, and Muslims: The Politics of Macro-majorities and Micro-minorities, Laura Dudley Jenkins4. Representing the 'Minority', Farhana Ibrahim5. Buddhists: The Political Dynamics of Conversion and Caste, Joseph M.T.6. Christian and Tribal: The Dynamics of Scheduled Tribe Status in the Field, Joseph Marianus Kujur7. Minorities and the Politics of Conversion: With Special Attention to Indian Christianity, Chad M. Bauman and Richard F. Young8. The Parsi Minority: Ethics and the Spirit of Indian Modernity, Murzban Jal9. The Curious Case of the Ramakrishna Mission: The Politics of Minority Identity, Sipra Mukherjee10. Sikh Minority Identity Formation: Nation and Politics in Post-colonial India, Natasha Behl11. From Inclusive to Exclusive: Changing Ingredients of Muslim Identity in Bombay Cinema, Yousuf Saeed12. The Violence of Security: Hindutva's Lethal Imaginaries, Dibyesh AnandNotes on Contributors

The volume explores the tenuous and often contentious relationships between minority groups' resoluteness on their cultural peculiarities, the persisting ides of a monolithic nation-state that invariable tends to view difference as deviance. Alongside, it marks a significant departure that many contributors rely on field data to probe the very category of minorities per se?its normative postures, definitional accuracies and propensity towards reifying otherwise fluid identities. The volume suggests that the process of the production of minority and majority identities implicates colonial and post-colonial statecraft, census enumeration, legal pronouncements, and also mobilisations on ground…the contributions encompass a wide range of subjects, cases and approaches, yet commonality of themes and arguments holds them together. Tanweer Fazal, Contributions to Indian Sociology 50:3 (2016)