Identity and Status of the Indian Muslim

Well-researched publications si-nce the Sachar Committee Report, 2006 are few and far between. The Sachar report brought together authentic empirical data on Muslims—the largest of the Indian minorities—and wrote analytical perspectives on social, educational, and economic levels in comparison to other socioreligious communities (SRCs). Indian Muslim(s) after Liberalization by Maidul Islam, therefore, is a welcome addition. It is topical and relevant to the contemporary social and economic growth discourses of India. A verbose book, often with pleonastic passages, it consists of four numbered chapters, but a rather long prologue and an epilogue.

The prologue starts with posing sets of pertinent questions on various social, political, and developmental aspects and the status of the Muslim community in India. It reviews sociopolitical literature to itemise multiple aspects of Muslim identity, albeit I find it an upper-middle-class narrative. The “multiple-identity” framework proposed by Amartya Sen (2006) could have been a better framework for establishing the Muslim identity by recognising the dominant impact of the supra-Indian culture and Indian ethos on the one side and contemporary modern interactive associations, with the larger majority community consisting of innumerable varieties of castes and classes, on the other. There is not much in this book on liberalisation, since this terminology is used only for temporal purposes, namely the 1990s and thereafter.