Another India

Another India tells the story of the world's largest religious minority through vivid biographical portraits. Elite and subaltern Muslims appear side by side, and their lives are woven into a single account of the community since Independence. Pratinav Anil challenges traditional histories and points to the neglect of minority rights after 1947. He argues that Indian Muslims have had to face discrimination, disadvantage, deindustrialization, dispossession and disenfranchisement, along with a leadership that did not respond to them. He follows the rise and fall of the Muslim elite and the emergence of the nationalist Muslim, and he stresses that class is key to understanding Indian politics. The book also examines the entrenched interests and the depoliticization of the privileged classes. These led the landed gentry to betray ordinary members of the community, and India's 200 million Muslims still feel the effects of that betrayal. The result brings Muslim agency out of the margins of history and presents a different picture of democratic India, one that questions the accepted accounts of the world's largest democracy.