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Available From UC Press
The Gabriel of Madness
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Since a right-wing Hindu nationalist government came to power in 2014, Indian Muslims have faced rampant Islamophobia, lynchings and mob violence, discriminatory legislation, and economic ostracism. How have Indian Muslims—the largest religious minority in the world’s largest democracy—responded to the failures and demise of state secularism? Using the lens of Urdu poetry, this beautiful ethnography explores how Indian Muslims have drawn upon Islamic traditions to actualize free-thinking selves and imagine a pluralistic society unbeholden to coercive state power. Through poetic symposiums, interviews, social media, and deep conversations with diverse Muslim interlocutors, from religious leaders to politicians, civil society activists to poets, Anand Vivek Taneja paints a portrait of the vitality of Indian Muslim artistic, ethical, and spiritual life at a moment of existential crisis.
“This work is a timely and moving account of Muslim life under Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, told through the lens and guidance of Urdu poetry. Following these verses, Anand Vivek Taneja makes important and unprecedented contributions to the understanding of the interior, ethical, and social experience of both Muslim and Hindu life. While a work of anthropology concerned with ethics and self-fashioning, it will doubtless be regarded as an important historical record of the interior lives of Indians during a particularly disturbing period in the nation’s history.”—Oludamini Ogunnaike, author of Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madi? Poetry and Its Precedents