Nationalism and knowledge: Othering and the disciplin(e)ing of anthropology in India

Abstract

This essay is about how Indian anthropology-sociology has historically theorized Islam and Muslims. In it, I demonstrate how anthropologists’ discourse on Islam and the majoritarian Hindu discourse on nation–Muslims being its constitutive other–dovetail into each other. Three main catalogues through which anthropology has dealt with Muslims are: silence, alienness and erasure. Against anthropology’s self-perception as the most reflexive discipline, I argue how Indian anthropology has been intertwined with nation-state as both an ideology and a set of practices. I also identify connections between symbolic violence of anthropology-sociology manifest in the othering of Islam and anti-Muslim political violence in postcolonial India. Discussing influential texts, schools of thoughts, departments, individuals, institutions, professional association in a framework that comparatively alludes to the ‘anomaly’ of Jews vis-à-vis German anthropology, this essay also charts out a different genealogy of anthropology in India, one that remains hushed in the regnant accounts. In so doing, it maps the discipline’s trajectory from its moment of formation to the present. One key aim of the essay is to unveil the theory behind methodological nationalism to discuss the (im)possibility of writing an alternative anthropology-sociology of India.