In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia

The book questions the historicist preoccupation with incidents and processes of conflict, conquest, iconoclasm, and sets out to look at co-existence and peaceful interactions at the grassroots as equally crucial for the formation of identities. Written with perception and lucidity, it could be used profitably by scholars and by students, teachers, activists and the general reader.

Contents

Introduction by Kumkum Sangari

1. A historiographical essay on Hindu-Muslim relations
2. Composite Culture in Pre-Partition Punjab: Fractures and Continuities
3. The Historian and the Indian Census: Accounts of Religion in late Nineteenth Century Punjab
4. The Census in Colonial Ceylon
5. Minority Rights, Secularism and Civil Society (co-authored with Yamini Aiyar)
6. The Ahmadi Problem: an unfinished essay
7. Appendices: a. I would like to …; b. Concept Paper on the Census; c. Being an Ahmadi in an Age of ‘Islamic terrorism’

Meeto by Judith Brown

Meeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik; 1978-2006) was a scholar, activist and dancer. She graduated with first class honours in History from Stephen’s College. With the Radhakrishnan-British Chevening Scholarship, she studied History in Oxford University and graduated with a first class honours. Meeto’s pre-doctoral research at Oxford was tragically interrupted by her passing away in 2006.

Meeto researched and wrote on projects ranging from the refugee problem in post-Partition Punjab to the role of parliamentarians in Indian democracy and the role of the colonial census in creating monolithic identities in Sri Lanka.

Meeto also was the first primary coordinator of South Asians for Human Rights and helped organize the first general convention of SAHR in Rajasthan. Between 2003 and mid-2004, she worked as a programme associate at the Ford Foundation in Delhi working on human rights and development issues.

As a dancer, Meeto performed with Leela Samson’s dance production Spanda across India and in Bangladesh.

Meeto’s academic and professional interests were at one with the way she lived. She revelled in the aesthetic traditions of the multiple religious and cultural traditions to which she was an heir as a South Asian citizen.

Meeto – Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik