Description: More than 150 million Muslims live in India, the largest minority, yet they are losing power. The contributors consider the regional differences, the role of self-segregation, and the future of Muslims in India.
Review Quotes: "Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot have assembled an impressive array of scholars to produce a fascinating portrait of India's Muslim communities. The analyses are well-researched, offer new insights, and provide complex and often disturbing accounts of the state of Muslim communities across metropolitan India. The contributors eschew facile generalizations, provide fine-grained accounts, and display an admirable sensitivity to both historical and contemporary social forces that have helped define the current socioeconomic and political conditions of India's most sizable minority in its urban milieus. This work contributes much to addressing an important lacuna in the literature on the contemporary politics and status of India's Muslim minority."--Sumit Ganguly, author of Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947
"Urban India, the locus of the country's economic surge, is home to over a third of India's Muslims--and it is there that the diverse cultures of Muslim India once flourished. Yet today, India's urban Muslims are the most disprivileged of its urban citizens, and their life-chances are sharply constrained in every respect. In this pioneering set of political ethnographies, the predicament of Indian Muslims is examined across a dozen cities. Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot's substantial volume at once illuminates empirical conditions and tests theories about ghettoization, integration, and the political attitudes of India's urban Muslims."--Sunil Khilnani, director of the India Institute, King's College London"Christophe Jaffrelot's range of scholarship is amazing, and his new book, Muslims in Indian Cities, coedited with Laurent Gayer, illustrates well his wide-ranging interests. The contributions are instructive and insightful and cover a much-neglected theme in contemporary South Asia."--Mushirul Hasan, director general of the National Archives of India"This is certainly the best empirically-researched book on Muslims in contemporary India that I've read. It brilliantly highlights the magnitude of Muslim marginalization and the desperate need to address it."--Yoginder Sikand, author of Muslims In India Since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-Faith Relations and Bastions Of The Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education In India"The volume is an important reference for researches on Muslims in contemporary India." -- Mohammad Talib, Oxford Journals Book Review