Laurence Gautier - Between Nation and Community: Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition

Between Nation and Community examines the political role of two prominent Muslim universities (Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia) in post-independence India, from Partition (1947) to the late 1990s. The book argues that these two public institutions constituted platforms to imagine the nation as much as the Muslim community. They served as intermediaries between central state authorities and the Muslim population. In the absence of pan-Indian Muslim parties, they also formed major centres for different strands of Muslim politics in the post-independence period. By closely looking at the relation between these institutions and state authorities, the book teases out the ambiguities of the state’s Muslim policy. It also examines, in turn, how university members responded to this policy and developed competing conceptions of Muslim identity and citizenship, which structured the wider public debates on Muslims’ status in post-partition India.

Laurence Gautier is a Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and taught for four years at O.P. Jindal Global University (Sonipat, India) as Assistant and then Associate Professor. She writes on Muslim politics, secularism, minority rights, nation-building and university politics in post-independence India. Between Nation and Community is her first monograph. She also co-edited Historicizing Sayyid-ness: Social Status and Muslim Identity in South Asia (JRAS, 2020)