On 06-Sep-06, at 6:05 PM, Badri Natarajan wrote:
Yeah, plus Islamophobia. Note that if there had been a reliable
(visual)
way to ascertain if you were Muslim or not, you would probably not
have
been hassled at all at airports. The point being that although
there is
certainly racism & xenophobia, much of it is being unleashed and
fueled by
Islamophobia.
Have you read "On Representing the Musalman" by Shahid Amin? He
tackles just this, the stereotypical visual representation, then goes
on to examine why the Indian Muslim is an "other" (while the Indian
Christian is not). The investigations lead to the 1870s, to the
period when Hindi nationalist writers sought to shape Hindi as the
national language of India and necessarily had to distance it from Urdu.
Sarai has the first part, on visual representation, online:
http://www.sarai.net/journal/04_pdf/12shahid.pdf
The full length version appears in Subaltern Studies XII, available
from the CSCS library in Bangalore:
<http://www.cscsarchive.org/MediaArchive/Library.nsf/(docid)/
7C8688586356157165257154003FF44F?
OpenDocument&StartKey=Subaltern&Count=10>
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.seacrow.com/
