Life After Death: Ritual and Placemaking in Old Delhi

The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs’ South Asia Center presents Kalyani Menon. In today’s India where we see the ascendancy of Hindu supremacy, the place for Muslims is shrinking.  Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with diverse Muslim groups in Old Delhi, this talk examines how religion provides an arena for Muslims to intervene in the political.  The religious practices of Old Delhi’s Muslims imbue localities with particular cultural inflections and can be seen as modes of making place.  Focusing on tensions that have emerged among different groups of Muslim women over mourning rituals in Old Delhi, the talk explores how they not only index diverse constructions of ideal religious subjectivity but also illustrate how Old Delhi’s diverse Muslim communities organize difference and construct belonging in contemporary India. In so doing, the talk explores how rituals about death are also very much about life, providing an arena for Old Delhi’s Muslims to variously make place for themselves in India today.

Kalyani Menon is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University.  She received her doctorate in anthropology from Syracuse University.  Her research focuses on religious politics in contemporary India.  Her first book, Everyday Nationalism:  Women of the Hindu Right in India, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.  Her most recent book, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India, was published this year by Cornell University Press.