This review was first presented at the 2025 Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies organized by the Maydan/ AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies at GMU on December 18, 2025.
Functioning as a passe-partout, Kalyani Devaki Menon’s Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India1 opens up critical pathways into the expanding literature on the ‘everyday’ experiences of Indian Muslims. Menon’s work, grounded in Anthropology, is a major theoretical intervention in the literature, in which she does what anthropologists do best – “rely on ethnography to sketch the possibilities planted by those whose lives filled the pages of this book” (163). This reminds us of the need for thick ethnography in general and for studying the marginalised in particular—here, the Indian Muslims—among whom, as Van der Veer2 notes, “students of Indian Islam almost form a separate community”.
Hence, as making is also an act of unmaking, Menon’s work on Muslim residents of Old Delhi and their everyday tactics of making place, by extension, creates a place for Muslims in contemporary Indian sociological debates.
Drawing on intermittent fieldwork beginning in 2011, her main focus is on the Muslims of Old Delhi, and their place-making efforts in the face of ‘contemporary’ Hindu Nationalism. Like any ethnographer, she does so by relying, or rather, by reaching into her ethnographic toolbox, which contains various narratives, discourses underlying such narratives, anecdotes, participant observations, and articulations or disarticulations of the “subjects” (106) under her study. Most importantly, she highlights the plurality of her subjects’ identities, negotiating their positionality between competing hegemonies and contradictory pulls.
The book is divided into two sections: (i) Landscapes of Inequality, and (ii) Making Place. The former consists of two chapters, while the latter includes three chapters. The structure adds to the readability of the text. The first section, premised on explaining, conceptualizing, and articulating the existing landscapes of inequality, provides the reader with a structured theoretical entry point into Old Delhi’s landscape. The preceding section appears to be thicker; it can weave the intricate plural subjectivities of its ‘subjects’, allowing the reader to grasp the visible segmentary opposition.
The first chapter (A Place for Muslims) weaves together the everyday life narratives of Rehana, Nazia, Ameena, and Zafar, highlighting how their “structural positions as Muslims situate them in the unequal topographies of Hindu-majoritarian India” (33), wherein her interlocutors belonging to variegated education, gender and class backgrounds had to negotiate their identities through the landscape of anti-Muslims prejudices. This prejudice is blind to the poor/rich Muslim dichotomy. The violence and exclusion faced by Muslims make them “seek safety in numbers” (40), explaining such exclusionary boundaries. Menon cites Yuval-Davis3, who, while pointing out these boundaries of segregation, notes: “sometimes physically, but always symbolically, separate the world population into ‘us’ and ‘them’”. Hence, to design a hygienic, orderly Hindu home, the Muslim, or the ‘them’, are ‘outcasted’4 to specific areas.
Similarly, in the second chapter (Gender and Precarity), Menon employs Judith Butler’s5 concept of precarity, which Butler defines as a “politically induced condition” where “certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death”. Precarity is a condition which affects all subaltern groups. However, Menon delves into the exceptional precarity of Muslim women like Saiba Baji (63), a Zardozi artisan, or Saadia Baji (58), a sole-breadwinner bangle seller, and how they negotiate precarity, which falls on the intersection of womanhood, faith, and economic marginalisation. Thereby, demonstrating how the Muslim women should not be looked through the singular lens of religion, but rather, how their religious identity intersects with their other identities, affecting their position, and they ride out the storm of social, political, and economic subjugation in contemporary India.
It is on this note that Menon concludes the first section (Landscaped of Inequality) of her book and begins the second section (Making Place).
The third chapter (Perfecting the Self) serves well in steering the flow of the book and comes at a time when the reader is already aware of the plural identities of Menon’s subjects. The chapter talks about “Abida and other women in the Muslim Club, who engage in dawa (religious outreach) and teach others in their communities about Islam and its place in the modern world” (87). And how the attempts of the Muslim Club should be looked at as “making place for Muslims in places like Old Delhi” (105), as through the propagation of their understanding of Islam, they also engage in increasing the visibility of Muslims. Menon argues that this trend of challenging, opposing, or contesting majoritarian political impulses is the context behind the formation of the Muslim Club, which aims to “return to the foundational texts and the practices of the Prophet and his companions” (112).
The fourth chapter (Living with Difference) transposes the previous chapter. The Muslim Club was, in some sense – exclusionary; contra Muslim Club, Menon tries to dissect the unfolding of Shii-Sunni relations during the Muharram commemorations in Old Delhi. She argues that Shii rituals and narratives during Muharram enable forms of identity that transcend exclusionary constructions of community, thereby enabling Old Delhi’s residents to “live with difference” (116). Notably, she highlights an important point – not that both Sunni Muslims and Hindus participate in the commemorations, but rather “how repeatedly it was expressed to me by Shias” (130), and how it “affirm[s] a plural consciousness”6. Therefore, she posits that one must not only focus on difference; rather, it is the “articulations of identities that marginalize difference and blur boundaries between groups” (136), and is something which must be focused on – anyhow, she does not tell us the epistemological underpinnings of such articulations of Shia-Sunni brotherhood – and if such articulations were there to veil – or depoliticise the inherent unequal practices of power between the two groups.
Fortunately, I came across Menon’s work only after going through Ravi Nandan Singh’s work on funerary practices, which pointed out the pervasive lack of interest in Indian Muslim funerary practices; therefore, coming across Menon’s final chapter was a surprise, though a delightful one.
The final chapter (Life After Death) deals with mourning rituals, funerary obligations, and how death is fundamentally about “people, communities, and places that are very much alive” (138). Accordingly, these funerary rites hold much symbolic value, as “how one mourns illustrates who one is” (157). Thus, though the funerary rites are much contested, and often termed as being “biddat (innovation) or shirk (attributing a partner to God)” (140), or being ‘infected’ with Hindu culture, they provide an avenue to think about life, help in articulating constructions of self, and subsequently make a place for Muslims in ‘contemporary’ India. Menon skips the reason behind such articulations, on whose shoulders does the responsibility of such peace or shared culture lies?
Ghazala Jamil8 posited that research pertaining to Muslim localities has long been in a state of stagnation and had hoped that her book would spark off ‘fresh frames of reference’. I view Kalyani Devaki Menon’s work as a continuation of this trend; however, Menon’s accurate prose reads as a horizontal reading of reality and does not aim to examine the profound vertical truths9 that might be hidden beneath the surface of the narratives woven around her. This issue surfaces throughout the book – in Aamir Saheb’s nostalgia for a ‘shared past’, and in narratives of Shia-Sunni brotherhood, as she says, were ‘expressed to me by Shias’ (130).
To conclude, Menon’s work provides major theoretical interventions into studies related to Indian Muslims, especially her focus on the precarity of Muslim women, the plurality of identities, and funerary rites, which are ingeniously significant; espousing a fresh contribution to the literature, and providing tools for future research endeavours, for students and scholars alike.
Saiyid Ashraf Husain Jafri is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul. His research interests lie at the intersection of Muslim identity and urban precarity in India.