Practicing Democracy: Muslim Voluntary Associations in Colonial Bengal

• In Event: Genealogies of Indian Democracy: Practice, Thought, and Visual Culture (1900-1950)

Abstract

This paper focuses on Muslim voluntary associations of Bengal that were active in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Through an exploration of the organizational structure, institutional practices, geographic reach, and literature of avowedly non-political voluntary Muslim associations or anjumans, I attempt to show how such institutions were crucial to the instantiation of subjectivities oriented to democratic practice and politics in an era of severely restricted franchise. I argue that anjumans were key institutions within which ideas about Muslim identity were being contested and the identity’s relationship with novel conceptions of political sovereignty – rooted in popular mandate - worked out and dramatized.

Author

• Ananya Dasgupta, Case Western Reserve University