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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.
“A brilliant theoretical and ethnographic work opening up the poetics and politics of contemporary life in North India. Calls to our attention the resilience of the revolutionary ethos from the Urdu poetry canon and meaning making in everyday practices and ordinary selves.”—Manan Ahmed Asif, Columbia University
“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 Madīḥ Poetry and Its Precedents
“The Gabriel of Madness is a beautiful, unusual, vital book. Taneja shows how Urdu poetry, and especially the ghazal, has emerged as an ethical-political archive to resist the violent Hindutva order in India and to conjure a more capacious future for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Like the ghazal itself, The Gabriel of Madness is simultaneously particular and universal, emerging out of the space-time of contemporary India to offer essential insights into the moral agency of minorities to remake ethics and politics.”—Mayanthi Fernando, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz
“This beautiful prose reads like a taut psychological thriller. Through his rich ethnography, Taneja provides epiphanies and uncertainties in equal measure. Is the Muslim response to state-sanctioned violence a culturally intuitive, ethical response, or is it moral cowardice in its negotiations with power? He evokes hope, and he evokes doubts, as he has intended. This is the most engaging, imaginative work on the contemporary Indian Muslim condition.”—Shahrukh Alam, Indian Supreme Court advocate
“This is a beautifully written and timely ethnography that provides original insights into the complexities and struggles of Muslim life in contemporary India. Conducting fieldwork at a historical moment marked by Hindu supremacy, anti-Muslim hate, and violence, Taneja’s book perceptively examines how people forge a meaningful life amidst and against the authoritarian turn in India.”—Kalyani Devaki Menon, author of Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India