Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence by Shrayana Bhattacharya, HarperCollins Publisher India, 2021; pp 464, `699.
As the communal polarisation of voters has become a pivotal concern in the 2019 election, the debate within the Muslim public sphere around the dilemmas of representation has gained traction.
This paper argues that an emancipatory impulse is critical and central to feminist method--one which effectively counters a widespread fetishisation of social science research where little attention is paid to the relationships of production of research findings and conclusions. Just as the women's movement and its political critique has affected discourses that are not specifically about gender or sexual distinctions, the emancipatory impulse of feminist methods can also be deployed in enquiries that are not focused entirely on gendered accounts of social phenomena. The aim of this study is not to essentialise certain methods as "feminist" but rather to suggest that methods used by a researcher who is a feminist, in enquiries into phenomenon that throw up questions of hierarchies other than gender, would not remain uninfluenced by her feminist politics. This claim is bolstered by the author's experiences as a feminist researcher studying the segregation of Muslims in Delhi.
The threats and fear continue for the Muslims affected by the Muzaffarnagar riots in western Uttar Pradesh last year. Added to the pathetic conditions of the camps where they have fled to is the government's unclear defi nitions and non-transparent relief measures. Even as Muslims continue to move out of areas where sustained hate-mongering has made their lives miserable and lose their livelihoods in the process, many of those who have filed police cases fi nd they are welcome back only if they take back their complaints.
In today's neo-liberal economic milieu, Muslims in Delhi are being rediscovered as a human resource that is positioned as a specific part in the accumulation project which has little use for prejudice per se, but only to the extent that it aides the project. Muslims are grateful for jobs and businesses that take advantage of their skills, time, labour and assets and other supposed integrative advantages that this relationship brings with it. These neighbourhoods in Delhi are integrated in the city economy, and even global economy, but only so far as the balance of accumulation of capital is tipped in favour of spaces elsewhere.
