Accumulation by Segregation: Muslim Localities in Delhi by Ghazala Jamil

Author:Ghazala Jamil [Jamil, Ghazala]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2017-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

1 Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Bill 2006.

CHAPTER FOUR

Media Representations

Providing the Discursive Logic

REPRESENTATION OF SPACE AND IDENTITY FORMATION

This chapter explores the issue of representation of Muslims and urban segregated spaces. At the outset, one very simple way to understand representations is to see them as allegorical or metaphorical presentations of things, people, processes, and spaces. They may also be understood as models of what they represent. They make it easy for people to understand what they seek to represent by scaling down (architectural models of buildings, among others), presenting them as codes, symbols (images, music, or other kinds of texts), or by converting them to a different but more tame and tangible form (such as a globe or maps). But in scaling down or coding, distortions or caricaturing are bound to occur. In this process, it is also perhaps inevitable that certain features of the represented will be highlighted, and others will be downplayed, depending on the use or consumption of the outcome of representation. If we see a human being as a whole, her identity may be seen as a representational model that presents her by highlighting certain of her features. Different identities of a person may then be seen as ruptured pieces of the whole, but the whole—the human being—is always something more than the arithmetic total of all the identity pieces. Social relationships, interactions, and experiences form the very substantial and critical glue that holds the whole together, the lifeblood that makes this whole—a person.

Within the layers of identity formation, there are people who have the power to compose identities more or less at will. For example, at a given instant of time, the upper-middle-class youth may project themselves as ‘responsible citizens’ at a candlelight protest, but in the next instant they exercise their choice and can be devil-may-care party hoppers. Bauman has captured accurately the predicament of the marginalized and excluded people—like Muslims in India—when he points out in a different context that at ….

the other end are crowded those whose access to identity choice has been barred, people who are given no say in deciding their preferences and who in the end are burdened with identities enforced and imposed by others; identities which they themselves resent but are not allowed to shed and cannot manage to get rid of. Stereotyping, humiliating, dehumanizing, stigmatizing identities … (2004: 38)

Drawing from the preceding discussion, I assert that each of a person’s identities has a material function. I contend that an understanding of identity also as a political (and not merely as a social–psychological) construct would help us to complete this examination of the roots of discrimination and prejudice. An aspersed identity has a distinctly oppressive and exploitative material function. The tangible and intangible benefits to be accrued out of discriminatory behaviour make it worthwhile for a system of dominance to resist any changes and maintain itself. This fits very well in the Althusserian account of the ideological state apparatus in which individuals work on their own to reproduce class

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