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The Association cordially invites you to this year's annual lecture about Muslims in India today. Indian Muslims are a peculiar minority. First by their sheer number: with about 14% of the total Indian population, they are more than170 million. Second, they are doubly affected by the legacies of Partition: they have not only lost most of their elite groups in 1947, but also bear the stigma of this past - in the eyes of Hindu nationalists at least.
In 2006 the Sachar Committee Report has shown that Muslims were experiencing a process of marginalisation in socio-economic and political terms at a macro-national level. For instance, only 8% of urban Muslims were found to be part of the formal sector whereas the national average was 21% for Indian town and city dwellers. Most of the Indian Muslims are either self-employed or work in the informal sector.
This lecture will update this six-years old assessment and enrich it with a more local approach. It will focus on the place of Muslims in a dozen Indian cities in order, not only to measure their decline among local elite groups (businessmen, lawyers, politicians etc.), but also to compare processes of ghettoization and self-segregation. The situation of Muslims in Indian cities is all the more important as this community is more urban than any other (except the Parsis and the Jews) and its urban elements are poorer than their rural co-religionist, a quasi-unique situation (shared only by the Sikhs).
Speaker biography
Dr Christophe Jaffrelot is a professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, and he teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po (Paris). His research interests include: theories of nationalism and democracy; mobilization of the lower castes and untouchables in India; Hindu nationalist movement; ethnic conflicts in Pakistan.
He is graduate of the institut d’études politiques (IEP) in Paris, the université de Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and of the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO). He has a doctorate in political science from IEP, and has achieved a post-doctoral Habilitation degree. Shorty after joining the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in 1991 he was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal in 1993, and became a senior research fellow at the institution in 2002. Between 2000-2008 he served as the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI.)
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