The Centre de Sciences Humaines is pleased to invite you to the CSH Seminar

by

The social space of Muslim leadership in India:
profiles, trajectories, and networks of office-bearers in Muslim organizations

The session will be online via Zoom on 17th May 2021, 05:00 pm onwards:

https://zoom.us/j/91580551663?pwd=a0pOVnBrSExVdkJwc25adk55Sm1IQT09

To get priority access in case of large affluence, kindly register to:
neeru[dot]gohar[at]csh-delhi[dot]com

Abstract: Who speaks for Muslims in India? Who are the leaders of the so-called “Muslim organizations”? Where do they come from? What is their family background and educational training? What are their similarities and differences? Do they form a closely interlinked network, or are they conversely loosely connected? This presentation hopes to answer some of these questions by presenting a unique biographical database and the results of statistical treatments (multi-correspondence analysis) of this data. This database includes the office-bearers of a selected set of organizations that make representative claims in the name of Muslims in India. Our analysis thus delineates the contours of the social space of Muslim leadership in India and describes how it is structured. We will highlight the important distinctions that exist among these “Muslim leaders”, such as the opposition between secular figures and religious scholars, the political sphere and the educational sphere, and between central power and regional dynamics. This analysis in turn allows us to ask the question of the representativeness of the leaders of organizations that make representative claims in the name of Indian Muslims.

Speakers:

Nicolas Belorgey is a CNRS research fellow (www.cnrs.fr) at the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales, Paris (IRISSO, http://irisso.dauphine.fr). He is currently posted at the CSH and conducting different researches in India. One is on the unique ID in India: Aadhaar, on which he is writing a book. Another is on the social space of Muslim representation in India, in collaboration with Laurence Gautier and Julien Levesque. He is the author of many peer-reviewed articles and of the book, L’hôpital sous pression (La Découverte, 2011) dedicated to the ongoing transformation of hospitals under the New Public Management. “

Laurence Gautier is Associate Professor of History at Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities and Associate Researcher at Centre de Sciences Humaines (Delhi). She is interested in questions of Muslim representation in post-independence India. Beside this joint project on Muslim leaders, she is currently preparing her monograph, “Between nation and community: Muslim universities and Indian politics after partition”, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Julien Levesque is a political sociologist whose work focuses on issues of identity in South Asian Muslim societies. He is currently Head Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and is also affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), EHESS, Paris. He holds a PhD (2016) in Political Science from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), His ongoing work looks at dynamics of caste and leadership among Muslims in North India and Pakistan. His publications include a recently co-edited special issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society entitled “Historicizing Sayyid-ness: Social Status and Muslim Identity in South Asia”.