Negotiating Boundaries: Changing Dynamics of Intercommunity Relationships in Bhopal

The complex and myriad ways in which Muslims and Hindus, who are increasingly pitted as mutually exclusive and opposing collectivities in South Asia, interact with each other call for focussed discussion. My Ph.D thesis tries to map the changing dynamics of intercommunity relationships in a thriving Indian city, and ascertain the implications of this change against the backdrop of the rise of a majoritarian Hindu right-wing (Hindutva) regime, open advocacy of an aggressive brand of religious politics, calibrated attempts to exclude particular identified groups from the rubric of the nation, heightened contestation and violence. Basing itself in Bhopal, a burgeoning city in central India, the thesis draws attention to the existing chequered interface between the two communities, encompassing shared bonds as well as construction of hostilities that shatter them. My research attempts to unwind diverse criss-crossing threads and dimensions of this central concern. It brings together the archival and the empirical, harnessing a combination of written records and oral narratives to flesh out the emerging arguments.
The study takes note of Bhopal’s local specificities, unique historico-cultural legacy and political trajectory, focussing especially on prevalent patterns and practices of intercommunity engagement. The evolving fortunes of the city, its rapid expansion, transition from a subordinated princely state in colonial India to a sprawling provincial capital in the postcolonial context, gradual fragmentation into discrete zones and attendant hardening of socio-spatial boundaries constitute key themes of exploration. The city of Bhopal, as it stands today, has expanded and surged forth as distinct, and often disjointed, fragments, rather than developing as a composite whole, characterised by underpinning symmetry and cohesion. Its rugged and uneven topography, coupled with inadvisable planning, undertaken without paying much heed to existing physical and cultural attributes, partly explain the emergence of disparate zones. But, these explanations are insufficient in themselves—they need to be supplemented and problematised further. And this is precisely what my thesis sets out to do.

The city’s spatial discontinuity and dissonance have been inscribed and overlaid by yet another sinister layer of differing community affiliations. The identification of north/old Bhopal with Muslims and of south/new Bhopal with Hindus has been etched in popular consciousness. In recent decades, this distinction has been impressed upon with growing force and immediacy in dominant representations and imaginings of the city. In resident narratives, old and new Bhopal bear the signature of and come to be identified with Muslim and Hindu communities respectively. Misguided official policies and dictates have further cemented such ascriptive associations. Continued division of housing and neighbourhoods along religious lines has only served to bolster and reinforce the image of a fragmented city. By retrieving and engaging with a textured mix of narrated experiences, the thesis foregrounds some of these processes that have metamorphosed into invisible, yet often impermeable, mental borders, together with persistent efforts, made to subvert them.

Considerations of religion and community have become unduly important in determining people’s housing decisions and facilitating or denying access to available housing options. Tellingly, Bhopal’s Muslim residents—who represent about 26 per cent of the city’s population (Census of India 2011), constituting a fairly large and conspicuous religious minority group—have been hit hard by this and their narratives take note of the biases involved in house-hunting. They have to contend with constant suspicion and scrutiny, adding decidedly to their share of worries. Thus, not far unlike the constraints faced by their counterparts in rest of the country, Bhopal Muslims too report feeling increasingly threatened and cornered. Across different categories of age, class, gender, occupation and the like, they reflect on the volatility of their immediate environment and their own precarity.

The variegated negotiations that different sections of the Muslim community enter into, in order to carve out a favourable existence for themselves, their ongoing attempts to come to terms with the shifting cityscape, their discernible relegation to particular marked spaces, and persistence of viable forms of cross-community engagement—or its absence thereof—get mapped. The thesis taps into their lived experiences and inhabited worlds. In doing so, it tries to uncover their everyday realities, dilemmas and life choices. It brings forth routinised experiences of exclusion, discrimination and spatial segregation that they have to typically contend with. It further plots the multilevel insecurity that they often wade through and endemic mistrust that they encounter. Recurrent efforts of local Muslims, slated to overcome gnawing insecurity, prejudice and presumptive hostility get examined, while their withdrawal or internment within specific neighbourhoods, in the face of steady emergence of communally segregated housing comes to be flagged. Growing segmentation of city spaces and reification of boundaries figure as key planks of discussion here.


This thesis considers the gradual processes of crusting of intercommunity relationships and emergence of divided cityscapes, whereupon it goes onto decipher the driving motivations of those who have played an active role in deepening these fissures. In the course of the inquiry, I was particularly drawn towards exploring the considerations and intentions that power the activism of women of the Hindu Right, the various forms that it takes, the directions in which it is channelised, and the spheres that it encompasses. I capture the experiences and self-narratives of women members of the Hindutva organisational umbrella, in order to find out what they think of critical questions of their own agency, its extent and limits, the nature of activism that they engage in, prevailing communal relations in the city, need for inclusivism and access to equal gender rights. Such an engagement can crucially demystify their constitutive worldview, existent social contexts from which they are drawn and wider political concerns that prompt them to embrace the Hindutva agenda.

To sum up, this thesis speaks to and lays bare diverse problematics. It seeks to discern prevalent patterns of spatial arrangement and intercommunity dialogue in Bhopal. It maps the multiple ways in which these play out on the ground and the larger, often unaccounted for, shifts that they signal. In doing so, it provides an important window to survey the local and, at once, go beyond it to interrogate the wider processes of emergence of fractured geographies and breakdown of social relations.