Nazariya

In recent years, scholars of South Asian Islam and Indian Muslims themselves have paid renewed attention to caste. This renewed interest is largely the result of the emergence of a critique internal to Muslim politics, carried by activists from marginalized caste-groups who challenge the leadership of the dominant groups.

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This talk aims to throw light on the contemporary debates on Muslim caste in India, by providing a genealogy of the categories in use. In order to show where contemporary debates come from, Levesque will highlight three historical moments in the scholarship on Muslim caste.

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First, he will talk about how colonial scholars and administrators tended to understand the phenomenon of Muslim caste as the product of a history of conquest and miscegenation. This conception presided over the Ashraf-Ajlaf dichotomy that still informs contemporary debates.

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Second, he will turn to the socio-anthropological debates of the second half of the twentieth century on whether a caste system existed among Muslims. HE suggests that the Hindu-centric understanding of caste hindered scholarship on Muslim caste.

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Third, he will explore how new legal conceptions of caste among Indian Muslims became a steppingstone for political mobilization under the “Pasmanda” banner since the 1990s. This mobilization, in turn, led to new scholarship that seeks to move beyond the conceptual limitations of previous research on Muslim caste. Finally, Levesquw returns to the present-day to analyze emerging forms of mobilizations among Pasmanda Muslims.