Minority Studies (OIP)

This volume explores the issue of minorities in India and how they are identified, defined, and categorized by legal and institutional processes. It examines how modern law creates and conditions minority identity and also how groups manipulate the ground-level situation to project a certain identity at a particular point of time. When more than one category applies to a group, and such categorizations become the basis for the struggle for rights, the politics of identity become even more complex. The volume specifically focuses on ''religious'' minorities, questioning the religious identification of groups and showing that the construction of minority groups in religious terms is difficult to achieve given the existence of several, and sometimes contradictory, loyalties and identities. The essays address the minority issue by engaging with different minority communities in India. These also question the relationship of minority identities to caste, gender, and tribal identity. This is the new paperback edition.

In India, the minority logic has been inherited from the Independence struggle and Partition history, and ratified by provisions in favour of minorities in the Constitution. Yet, the process of minority identity formation at the ground level, and the complex and changing dynamics of state and legal institutions in these constructions, is worthy of closer analysis. How does modern law create and condition minority identity? How do groups manipulate and project a certain identity? What is the relation of caste, gender, or ethnic associations with minority identity? What happens when a group considered part of the majority demands minority status? The current discourse on minorities in India is just beginning to explore these intriguing questions. Minority Studies, the first volume in the new series brings together a group of scholars across disciplinary boundaries to tackle a host of core issues related to the identification, definition, and categorization of religious minorities, foregrounding the significant and immediate social categories of caste, gender, ethnicity, and class.