Everyday Peace?

Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India

Philippa Williams

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118837801, 9781118837818
• eBook ISBN: 9781118837788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Winner of the 2016 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award of the Political Geography Specialty Group at the AAG

Providing important insights into political geography, the politics of peace, and South Asian studies, this book explores everyday peace in northern India as it is experienced by the Hindu-Muslim community.

• Challenges normative understandings of Hindu-Muslim relations as relentlessly violent and the notion of peace as a romantic endpoint occurring only after violence and political maneuverings
• Examines the ways in which geographical concepts such as space, place, and scale can inform and problematize understandings of peace
• Redefines the politics of peace, as well as concepts of citizenship, agency, secular politics, and democracy
• Based on over 14 months of qualitative and archival research in the city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, India

Chapter One
Introduction

Situating Everyday Peace

As we sat on the padded cotton-lined floor of Jamaal’s sari showroom, drinking Sprite out of thick green glass bottles, he proceeded to tell me with great enthusiasm just how intertwined relations were between Muslims and Hindus in the silk sari industry of his north Indian city. “Hindus and Muslims all work in this industry,” he said “it’s like a cycle, the silk is sold by a Hindu and prepared by a Muslim, then the weaver is Muslim and the embroidery is later done by a Hindu and finally the sari is sold to a Hindu woman who wears it.” Jamaal was a member of a prosperous Muslim family, but as many Muslim and Hindu informants had told me before our meeting, and as I would continue to hear many times after this encounter: “in the silk sari culture itna pakka rishtedar hai” (relations are really good), they are like “tānā bānā” (warp and weft). The reiteration of this narrative, often framed in terms of “brotherhood” and consciously describing everyday harmonious relations between Hindus and Muslims, is striking in the context of north India.

A glance at the Indian and western print-media over the past few decades portrays a different story; of the incommensurable differences between Hindus and Muslims, and the persistently violent nature of their interactions, often made manifest in “riots” (see Tambiah 1996). But Jamaal was not an idealist. He acknowledged that there were sometimes tensions between these two communities, and in recent years riots had created challenges for their working relationships, which had subsequently prompted different parties to actively ensure that the “shanti” (peace) was not disturbed. Such “peace talk” was not only articulated by Muslim weavers and businessmen eager to make a living in a challenging market, but it also animated conversations amongst other residents about the character of their city, and it underpinned the political and media discourses that were deployed about urban life, especially where everyday peace appeared to be under threat.

Sensitive to the rhetorical and lived potency of “peace talk” and practice in this north Indian city, this book develops a critical and grounded approach to understanding everyday peace. The account presented here is concerned with questions about what peace looks like, how peace is spatially and socially produced and reproduced, in whose image is peace constructed and how different people experience peace differently. Importantly, it seeks to interpret experiences of peace from the margins, and accordingly develops an understanding of everyday peace through the lives of those living in a Muslim neighborhood, in the majority-Hindu city of Varanasi.

India’s Muslims, as in other parts of the world, are regularly marked either as “dangerous terrorists” or as “passive victims” and in both instances subjected to patterns of discrimination and stigma. A key argument of this book is that these pervasive narratives differentially conceal the notion of the Indian Muslim as citizen. They obscure the ongoing struggles by Muslims to improve or maintain their material wellbeing as well as the myriad ways in which Muslims are orientated towards securing and maintaining peace within the Indian secular state and social milieu. By grounding peace in this specific spatial and social context, this book illustrates how peace interacts with agency and legitimacy, citizenship and justice, and how these are constitutive of the production of place. As such, this is a book about the geography of peace: how peace makes place, and how a place makes peace. It demonstrates how as an inherently relational construction, peace is both the product of and the context through which differences and connections are assembled and negotiated across scale, articulated through different forms of “peace talk” and informed by uneven geographies of power. Rooted in the local, this particular geography of peace is thus concerned with how peace is socially and spatially (re)produced in and through interconnected sites and scales, including the body, the neighborhood, the city, region and nation.

India represents a fascinating place within which to problematize the notion and practice of peace because of the region’s postcolonial experience of religious politics, violence and nonviolence. Incidents of Hindu–Muslim violence, notably referred to as “riots,” have taken place in India, during and since the subcontinent’s partition, and increased in their frequency and intensity between the late 1980s and 2000s (e.g. Pandey 1990; Roy 1994; Nandy 1995; Kakar 1996; Tambiah 1996; Oza 2006). More recently, Islamist terrorist attacks in India’s metropolitan and regional cities have caused death and injury (Ahmad 2009; Bishop and Kay 2009). The notion of immanent tension and violence between Hindus and Muslims is also reflected at the geopolitical scale with respect to the hostile nature of India–Pakistan relations, for instance, political posturing around nuclear capabilities, the ongoing dispute over Kashmir and following the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks (see Wirsing 1998; Ganguly and Hagerty 2005; Ramesh et al. 2008). Meanwhile, the 2000-km fencing project along India’s national border with Bangladesh represents a particularly tangible geopolitical articulation of the divisive nature of Hindu–Muslim politics that informed the making of India and continues to shape politics in the region (see Jones 2009; Hussain 2013). These tensions have become intertwined in the making and remaking of India’s geopolitical borders and politics and ultimately, underpin its citizenship project.

It is not just within India’s cities and along its borders that the nation’s religious differences and inherited inequalities find expression, but also in state policy spaces, through the drafting and interpretation of the Indian Constitution. The Constitution was underpinned by the need to imagine how the idea of India’s democracy would be institutionalized and practiced in order for India to realize a peaceful postcolonial future. Key challenges facing the architects of the Constitution were: how to manage and minimize imagined and material differences between India’s majority Hindu population and its largest religious minority, Muslims; and how to create mechanisms for the inclusion of marginalized groups in order to avert the possibility of separatism or dissent and further inevitable violence. Given this, I argue that the Indian state policy of secularism can be interpreted as a living document for national peace, one that is informed by the understanding that to reproduce peace, spaces of tolerance, freedom, respect and equality need to exist between different communities. And, the state has to remain equidistant from all religions in its style of politics, although not entirely absent as is the case in most European applications of secularism. Despite the fact that secular practices of respect and equality between all religions have been compromised, with sometimes violent outcomes between religious groups, the idea of secularism nonetheless persists as a powerful rhetorical imaginary mobilized across different scales. Today, secularism constitutes a dominant political narrative and practice at different scales within Indian society. Exploring how it constitutes a vehicle for hope and opportunity for marginalized religious groups to make their claims to the nation and their rights to equality and justice importantly contributes to understandings of “lived secularism” as citizenship from below, and lived practices of peace.

When it comes to exploring Indian Muslim experience in India today, especially in the context of relational life, it is difficult not to become immersed in dominant literatures that emphasize the role of religious division and violence in shaping India’s national and geopolitical relations. Without denying the import of critiques concerning moments of intercommunity and international strife, the prevalence of such views has unwittingly functioned to construct and to fix Hindu–Muslim interactions as intractably antagonistic and habitually violent. More importantly, the focus on violent events means that actual lived realities in much of India, characterized by inter-community coexistence and everyday peace, risk being occluded.

Interestingly, this principal focus on violence and divisive politics is not unique to India. More generally, matters of war and violence have proven to be far more seductive foci for academic analysis whilst issues of peace have been typically relegated to a position of referential obscurity, in which “peace” is constructed simply as a negative, empty state, as the absence of violence. On the idea of nonviolence Kurlansky (2006) suggests that the problem is that despite the concept being the subject of praise by every major religion, and practitioners of nonviolence recognized throughout history, violence is taken for granted as the fundamental human condition (Arendt 1969). The implicit yet seldom expressed viewpoint amongst most cultures is that violence is real and nonviolence is unreal (Kurlansky 2006, p. 6).

This book argues the case for peace and nonviolence as something “real” and worth understanding, in its own right. Whilst we revere war we have not been taught how to think about peace (Forcey 1989). This may partly explain why previous engagements with peace in geography (e.g. Stolberg 1965; Pepper and Jenkins 1983; Kliot and Waterman 1991; Flint 2005b) and anthropology (e.g. Howell and Willis 1989; Sponsel and Gregor 1994) have not produced a coherent and sustained body of scholarship, let alone a critical perspective on peace. By contrast, the social sciences have contributed to deconstructing and uncovering the nature of power relations inherent in the course of “war,” particularly the War on Terror (Gregory 2006; Pain and Smith 2008; Dodds and Ingram 2009), conflicts in the Middle East (Yiftachel 2006) and the Balkans (Dahlman 2004). Even where “peace” is the focus of study in geography (Kobayashi 2009; Gregory 2010) and in peace studies (Barash 2000; Cortright 2008), the concept and actual experience of peace itself has been given remarkably little attention. However, the arguments for a more critical examination of peace have been building within different disciplines over recent years (Richmond 2005, 2008; Jutila et al. 2008; Williams and McConnell 2010; Megoran 2010, 2011 and McConnell et al. 2014).

Responding to these arguments this book evokes the pragmatism demonstrated by Jamaal as he seeks to negotiate peaceful relations in Varanasi’s silk market. Peace is not regarded as a trouble free product, but instead an ongoing process that is at once political and infused with power across different sites and scales. Adopting a geographical approach to notions of space, place and politics this book makes four key theoretical interventions. First, by grounding peace in place, this account illuminates the role of human agency in the (re)production of everyday peace. My account shows how local actors actively negotiate and (re)produce peace as policy, narrative, practice and strategy within different urban spaces and across different scales. Paying attention to local agency echoes recent moves by Oliver Richmond to foreground the role that international and local actors can play in peace keeping, through a hybrid local-liberal peace (Richmond 2010). In thinking about everyday peace I expand the focus beyond postconflict spaces, and into more prosaic contexts to show the contingent ways in which individuals and groups are situated within wider arenas that inform the everyday possibility and practice of living together.

This focus also develops scholarship on India from political science perspectives that have examined the role of agency in escalating intercommunity violence (Brass 2003) and wider societal mechanisms underpinning peace (Varshney 2002), but which have not directly addressed questions of peace and agency and the micropolitics of everyday life. Understanding the micromechanisms that constitute peace helps to explain how and why actors differentially orientate themselves towards people of difference through contrasting experiences of tolerance, solidarity, hospitality, indifference, tension and brotherhood, and how these everyday realities impact the shifting potential to (re)produce peace “on the ground.” With agency also comes questions of responsibility and legitimacy, so not only why and how certain people chose to act towards peace but also whether their actions are positively recognized, or not, and by whom.

Secondly, I contend that peace is political. Whilst peace is more often portrayed as a condition that is without or after politics and violence, the empirical narrative that emerges here is that peace is, in and of itself, political. A critical approach to peace is paramount for unpacking in whose image peace is made and remade, who bears the responsibility for maintaining peace and what the implications of this are for future peace. Examining the interacting role of narrative and practice in the (re)production of peace reveals the political work of peaceful narratives, for, whilst they may appear universally “good” they may also conceal and perpetuate uneven relations of power and marginality. Critical scholars of international relations and geographers, too, have exposed the structures of power that underpin the discourse of “liberal peace,” with its particular “Western” vision for what peace should look like and how it should be done (Duffield 2002; Jeffrey 2007; Richmond 2008; Springer 2011; Daley 2014). The book shows how other expressions of “peace talk” such as “brotherhood,” intercommunity harmony and interdependence, along with its vernacular equivalents, act as powerful narratives in both describing and constructing peaceful realities across different scales. But also, that these narratives have particular histories and are constitutive of a particular politics. Placing peace, therefore, foregrounds how power is integral to the making, shaping, undoing and remaking of peace. Where power is recognized as the immanent normalizing force that operates through the detailed fabrics of people’s lives, it is important to consider the different techniques of peace and how these may include domination, coercion, seduction, authority, compliance and complicity and not just, or not always, involve the reconciliation of tensions and realization of equality and justice that is often imagined as integral to “peace.” Whilst inspired by Johan Galtung’s rich conceptualization of peace, the book therefore challenges the binary between “negative peace” as the absence of violence and “positive peace” as the presence of social justice (Galtung 1969).

Third, the book develops an understanding of peace as process, as always becoming. From this perspective, peace demands ongoing labor and work rather than standing as an endpoint or as something which can be concluded (see Cortright 2008). As such, peace is precarious, it is contingent and its contours are continuously being reworked by actors and events along a continuum from the local to the global. Bearing in mind the political work involved in peace as process, the book questions assumptions that peace is a generative and positively transformative process (see Galtung 1969) and argues that practices of peace can also re-inscribe patterns of marginality. This approach builds on Laura Ring’s (2006) problematization of peace in a Karachi apartment building, and intersects with an understanding of human agency which goes beyond resistance, to consider the ways in which pragmatism, acceptance, resilience and patience find expression in efforts to make and re-make everyday peace. As such, peaceful realities need to be interpreted within a framework that encompasses broader practices of coexistence, as well as practices of citizenship, where subaltern actors struggle for inclusion in the city and wider polity. Finally, this account departs from “top down” conceptualizations of peace to represent a situated geography of peace. This in part responds to recent calls within peace studies to interpret the meaning of “peace” through fieldwork (Jutila et al. 2008) and extends anthropology scholarship on “peaceful sociality” (Howell and Wills 1989; Sponsel and Gregor 1994) by thinking more explicitly about the spatial and scalar processes that constitute peace. The book therefore attends to everyday peace “on the ground” to show how practices and narratives of peace are spatially situated and socially (re)produced within a particular north Indian city. It shows how peace as “talk” and as practice informs the making of place, and that, in turn place makes for particular forms of peace. It demonstrates the multi-scalar practices of different actors and demonstrates the interconnections between everyday peace and related practices of citizenship and experiences of justice from a subaltern perspective.

In order to develop this grounded approach to “everyday peace” the book centrally draws on different scalar narratives and practices of peace in and around a Muslim neighborhood in Varanasi, a regional city in north India and home to one million people. On the one hand Varanasi represents an “ordinary city” which contrasts with the metropolitan centers of New Delhi and Mumbai that are more often in the academic limelight, owing to their discernible global reputations and interconnections (see Robinson 2002). But, on the other hand Varanasi is also an “extraordinary” city; as an important center for silk manufacture involving Hindus and Muslims, who comprise almost one-third of the population, as a sacred Hindu pilgrimage site, and also as a city locally renown to be a “microcosm of India” given its diverse representation of other people from all over India. In many ways because of its “extraordinary” character, Varanasi is popularly constructed in regional and national imaginations as a “peaceful” city. Understanding how “peace talk” is expressive of various scalar articulations of Hindu-Muslim interactions and also contributes to a (re)making of place as peaceful is a central objective of the following chapters.

In order to conceptualize and empirically illuminate an understanding of everyday peace in north India the remainder of this chapter brings into dialogue diverse but related collections of literature over six core sections. First, I briefly introduce the politics of Hindu–Muslim violence and nonviolence in India to contextualize the theoretical and empirical impetus for research on everyday peace. Secondly, I outline the cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• List of Figures
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: The Scalar Politics of Peace in India
• Chapter Three: Making Peace Visible in the Aftermath of Terrorist Attacks
• Chapter Four: Political life: Lived Secularism and the Possibility of Citizenship
• Chapter Five: Civic Space: Playing with Peace and Security/Insecurity
• Chapter Six: Economic Peace and the Silk Sari Market
• Chapter Seven: Becoming Visible: Citizenship, Everyday Peace and the Limits of Injustice
• Chapter Eight: Conclusions: Questioning Everyday Peace
• References
• Index
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