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St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012 viduals described are real people whom I interviewed in 2009. I knew several of them before then and have kept in contact since (till 2012), so there is a longitudinal aspect to this study which traces their evolving trajectory of identity. Before proceeding to the empirical research on marriage and identity, a description of Islampur’s religious context is needed, and of religious conversion within that context. 4.1 Islampur’s religious context 4.1.1 Islampur’s communities Islampur lies in a predominantly Muslim region of the Indian subcontinent. Its population of around one million includes the usual socioeconomic mix of older aristocratic families, up-and-coming businessmen, technicians of all kinds, teachers, factory workers, daylabourers and beggars. All urban facilities are at full stretch as more and more landless poor migrate to Islampur; public servants supplement their small salaries through bribes where available; crime is growing; but the city continues to throb with a warm-hearted vibrancy that welcomes foreigners like myself. Islampur, like many cities in the region, has a mix of religious communities. Muslims range from Sunni to Shia, Brelwi to Deobandi, Islamist to non-practising. Christians form a minority, concentrated in particular areas of the city, where Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations once predominated but now face competition from a variety of newer groupings. Small Hindu, Sikh and Parsi communities complete the mix, though Islampur lives up to its name as a Muslim city overall. Each day before dawn the Muslim call to prayer penetrates one’s consciousness: first from one mosque loudspeaker, then another and another, until the air pulsates with a discordant but confident crescendo of praise to Allah. “God is greater” asserts not only a relinames have been changed, their locations masked, and a few non-important details of their stories adjusted. The description of Islampur is also somewhat disguised. My PhD thesis will include far more details, more quotes and richer biographical detail than in this article. Note that the terms ‘thesis’ and ‘dissertation’ in British usage are swapped in American terminology. St Francis Magazine is a publication of Interserve and Arab Vision 536
St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012 gious conviction but also a political declaration that minority religions may be tolerated but Islam takes precedence. It was not always thus. This region gave birth to Hinduism and Buddhism long before the Muslim armies arrived. For hundreds of years after that the context remained pluralist, with a mix of faiths and with Muslims as a ruling minority. Later under British rule, a people movement to Christ began among outcaste tribes on (or more accurately, below) the bottom rung of the Hindu caste system. 4.1.2 Attitude to Christians These groups were perceived as untouchable due to the polluting nature of their occupations: skinning hides, cleaning sewers etc. Even after leaving those occupations and/or converting to Christianity, they were unable to shake off this stigma as “sweepers” which persists to this day. In rural settings discrimination often remains as strong as ever (“Christians are the ones who remove our buffalo dung’, I was told), and some Muslims refuse to use the same cups or saucers as Christians. Moreover, some urban Christian neighbourhoods have a reputation for supplying alcohol, drugs or prostitutes. By no means do all Islampur’s Christian families derive from this “sweeper” background. Some trace their ancestry to higher-class converts or Anglo-Indians, while others have gained several rungs on the social ladder through education or hard work. Social discrimination has lessened somewhat in those places where Christians are urbanized, educated, and rubbing shoulders with Muslims in religiously mixed residential areas or workplaces. Even there, however, the two communities lead largely parallel lives with their own community structures, festivals and religious terminology. Against this general background of mixed social attitudes, specifically religious intolerance has certainly grown since the 1970s, fuelled by the rise of Islamism. Alongside and even eclipsing the old epithet of “sweeper” is the more recent one of kafir (“infidel”). Accounts of specifically religious discrimination, or of coerced conversion to Islam, are growing in frequency. And the wars in Iraq and Afghani- St Francis Magazine is a publication of Interserve and Arab Vision 537
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