Tanweer Fazal’s book, Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India, is an investigation of how a singular discourse of ‘Muslimness’ has been produced in India in defiance of the fact that the Muslims are a heterogenous and internally variegated community with divergent religious practices and beliefs. This book asks what binds a Bengali Muslim in Assam, with a Qureshi meat-seller in Uttar Pradesh and a Muslim villager in Bhagalpur Bihar, to a Muslim worshipper in Ayodhya or an Arzal Muslim seeking to be recognised as a scheduled caste person, notwithstanding their varied lived contexts? According to Fazal, it is their experience of ‘state’, not only in times of crisis but at an everyday level. This experience, Fazal argues, is not internally generated but produced externally, as a result of state practices, law-making and law-enforcement.
This idea of one’s identity being externally determined is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. He articulates his experience of walking down the street where a little French kid sees Fanon and says, “Look a negro” with a tremor. Fanon explored how the white gaze constructed a black man as dangerous and savage and splattered his body with blackness. Fazal similarly demonstrates how, in India, the statist gaze produces and reproduces a discourse of the Muslim as an internal other who is violent and treacherous. According to him, this state-sponsored identity flattens the Muslims into a homogenous community and thereby generates a particular kind of lived experience.
Conceptual framing of the book
Fazal’s book examines the inter-relationship of a triad – the State, the National Public, and the Margins. Fazal begins with setting aside the idea of the state as a concrete immovable system and instead finds the notion of ‘state-idea’ more productive to work with. The term ‘state idea’ implies that the state is most visible not in its policy declarations – the point that most political analysts focus on – but in the way its policies come to be framed, the way they are implemented; and in the way the state is experienced by social groups.
Fazal defines the Dominant or National Public as social groups that are “in constant interaction with the State” to the extent that each “structure the moral constitution of the other”. The Margins, according to Fazal, are the sites imagined (or ‘epistemologically produced’) by the State as “wild and uncontrolled” and “insufficiently socialised into law” and consequently bear the brunt of state power and violence. In this statist imagination, the Muslims find themselves located at the margins along with Dalits, tribals or the working poor with epithets such as criminal, fanatic, seditious and terrorist stuck on them. This semantic location of the ‘Muslim’ at the margin gives the state functionaries a free hand to use violence to tame, civilise and keep them in check. The experience of the Muslims nevertheless is a graded one as not all Muslims are evenly placed at the Margins and neither does this location elide the possibility of intra and inter community strife. For instance, the educated, upper caste Muslims occasionally escape the violence and have the possibility of being seen as the good or sarkari Muslims – what Fanon would call wearing a white mask.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.