Introduction
This article lays out a theoretical terrain for ‘performed conviviality’ within and beyond a ‘marginal hub’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Muslim-dominated woodworking mohallas (neighbourhoods) of Saharanpur, North India, the article argues that the current theoretical development of ‘conviviality’ as a normative projectFootnote 1 neglects instrumentality, violence, silence, and power, which are embedded in everyday convivial interactions. The article moves beyond normative conventions by attending to ‘performed conviviality’, which conceals these concerns but is also a part of what makes conviviality conceptually productive. I tie this in with forms of marginalization, both socio-economic and subjective, that are a part of mohalla life. I also consider the ways in which conviviality within a ‘marginal hub’, and conviviality more generally, are rooted in more than the locale alone. Thus, I scale up and engage with conviviality in the context of labour markets and global supply chains. At the opposite end of the spatial perspective I trace a sense of bordering and marginalization at the subjective level and explore the ways in which a ‘bordered’ or ‘marginalized’ subjectivity act to create ‘silence’ in everyday convivial interactions.
Along with the other contributions in this special issue, I bring together ‘marginal hubs’ (marginalized yet connected spatial configurations) and ‘conviviality’, understood as being about ‘normative concerns with how to make spaces more positively interactive, or conversely how spaces might become more convivial through the everyday practices and routines of people inhabiting them’.Footnote 2 The ethnography focuses on a relatively ‘informal’ urban context, involving limited state intervention in terms of planning or infrastructure. As such, my engagement with conviviality is more concerned with ‘everyday practices and routines’Footnote 3 than with attempts to make space more convivial through interventions. The types of conviviality generated in this context play out within shifting configurations of marginalization and connectedness shaped by economy, sociality, and space. I explore what conviviality does within the everyday, but I also draw out limitations regarding the ‘potentiality of conviviality’.Footnote 4
The article comprises three sections. The first engages theoretically with the mohalla as a ‘marginal hub’ and begins the process of intersecting this with conviviality. This sets the scene for the ethnographic sections that follow. The first of these details the woodworking industry. It illustrates the ways in which instrumentality is both present within, and producing of, degrees of conviviality. It illuminates how the economic and social configurations of the mohallas foster convivial relations, but argues that conviviality acts not only to bridge degrees of difference but also feeds global supply chains and sustains production by fermenting obligation and connectedness. The final section moves from the ‘global’ to the ‘subjective’. Here, I situate marginalization as rooted in the subjectivities of those experiencing it, as opposed to relative ‘distance’ from the nation-state. In this context, conviviality intersects with marginality and power to produce degrees of ‘silence’ within mundane convivial interactions.
Locating the mohalla: between marginalization and connectedness
With much work on colonial and post-colonial spaces focusing on nodal metropolises, such as Mumbai and Calcutta, or new metro centres, such as Bangalore or Gurgaon, provincial cities have remained peripheral in discussions of urban space in South Asia.Footnote 5 Often ‘… bypassed by the official fixation on new modernist cities and the anthropological predisposition towards the village’, this absence of attention leads Ajay Gandhi to refer to India's provincial urban centres as ‘black cities’.Footnote 6 Although some work has now been done on these spaces,Footnote 7 they remain ‘grey areas’ of which our understanding and empirical engagements are limited. Situated on the geographical, economic, and political margins, Saharanpur is a city with a population of 703,345,Footnote 8 in the northwest of Uttar Pradesh. Muslims comprise around 45 per cent of the total population, and it is often referred to as ‘little Pakistan’ by Hindus and others from neighbouring regions.Footnote 9 Within nationalist discourses the Muslim neighbourhoods in Saharanpur and similar cities are often presented as dangerous, dirty, ungoverned, and uneducated—the ‘danger and demonic character of the Muslim other’.Footnote 10 This blends in with representations of Indian Muslims defined through subtler means. For example, discourse around food may take on ‘cosmological meanings’Footnote 11 whereby the consumption of meat can be presented as symbolizing violence, pollution, or dangerous sexuality.Footnote 12 In Saharanpur, this imaginary was often applied to the Muslim mohallas by others in the city. However, this was also an imaginary cultivated in the context of national and international discourse.
Along with many Indian Muslims, the city's large Muslim population is often treated as marginal and defined as ‘marginalized’ by both state and civil society actors. However, the construction of such spaces as ‘marginal’ leaves little room for their theorization as ‘hubs’. A focus on connections resituates the city's wood mohallas. The Muslim identity of craft workers gives access to certain networks based on sociality, shared religiosity, and complex historical connections. Craft economies may exist at the margins. However, the margin itself is often a space of cultural mingling and conviviality where flexibility and the necessity for physical movement require network-building that is fundamental to economic survival. While remaining relatively enclaved in terms of religiosity and place-based identity, networks of work and migration utilized by the city's craft workers now extend across India and, increasingly, to the Gulf.Footnote 13 As such they also feed into global networks of production, labour migration, and wealth extraction as well as intersecting with Islamic circulations and a locally embedded supply chain enabled through class-based and gendered identities.Footnote 14 In every sense, then, the wood mohallas can be simultaneously theorized as ‘marginal’ and as a ‘hub’.
Working across the dialectic of ‘marginalization’ and ‘connectedness’ requires the ethnographic material to straddle the ‘global’ and ‘local’. Here, I follow Anna Tsing in arguing that this allows attention to be paid to ‘hidden relations of production’ and enables an understanding of the movement of objects, capital, and people, while simultaneously grounding the ‘local’ as a site where ‘global flows fragment and are transformed into something place bound and particular’.Footnote 15 In this framework, ‘place’ can be as much a centre, or ‘hub’, for national and global connections as it can be an end. It is, Saskia Sassen argues, the urban realm that offers the greatest potential for exploring connections of both the local and the global.Footnote 16 Asian cities, even those that are small or provincial, are highly networked spaces. As Shail Mayaram indicates, South Asian cities link to webs of interconnection stretching from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and embody forms of cosmopolitanism that are in constant process and are regularly intersected or incorporated via economic flows, trade, religion, or state and non-state actors.Footnote 17 Given conviviality's rootedness in normative projects of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, Mayaram's point proves particularly salient.Footnote 18
Despite its marginality, Saharanpur has long-established trading connections with the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan as well as religious links to the centre of the Islamic world and beyond. Mohallas are not relics of the past nor devoid of change. Rather, old craft industries, which form the economic backbone of places like Saharanpur, Meerut, Moradabad, and Bareilly, Bijnor—and areas of larger cities such as Delhi and Lucknow—have been reconfigured through engagement with global markets.Footnote 19 Growing populations and increasing, if highly unequal, affluence drive patterns of consumption, style, religiosity, and festivities.Footnote 20 These mini-metropolises are the heart of contemporary Indian development and thus reflect not only local but also national aspirations and insecurities. Yet there is much about mohalla life that makes everyday experiences of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ different from that of other spatial configurations in urban arenas across the subcontinent. Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer emphasize the importance of attending to the ‘trajectories of marginalization’ experienced by Indian Muslims, arguing that this is most keenly felt in the old cities of the North where partition heralded a loss of Muslim influence and, post-independence, their persistent and deliberate marginalization by the state.Footnote 21 However, experiences of marginalization are not shaped through a single trajectory nor felt identically by all residents of the mohallas. As Raj Chandavarkar argues, communalism and the structuring of urban space in the Indian context must be understood ‘in terms of the racialisation of social, especially religious, difference [but…] it cannot be grasped as religious conflict in isolation from caste and class, language and “ethnicity”’.Footnote 22
This pushes us to consider the residents of Saharanpur's Muslim mohallas not only as victims but as actively engaged in defining, shaping, negotiating, and contesting boundaries. Atreyee Sen describes the agglomeration of various mohallas into the sprawling slum of Sultanpur in Hyderabad.Footnote 23 Her ethnographic material illustrates how the configuration of Sultanpur is also shaped through spatial claim-making by residents. Sen focuses on mohalla mardangi (male pride) among young men and boys who exert youthful authority in defence of the Muslim neighbourhood and police its spatial definitions, in particular female engagement with the public sphere. As with Sen's descriptions of Sultanpur, the public spaces of the wood mohallas were dominated by men and boys. Yet, my experience was not constituted in the same stark spatial context that Sen conjures. Rather, the male sociality of the public sphere constituted a set of convivial relations which transverse certain boundaries, in particular those of biraderi (caste/communityFootnote 24) and class. Thus, the mohallas can be represented not only through communalism but also as realms for connection and community-building, a duality Chandavarkar illuminated in earlier material.Footnote 25
These contributions to understanding the Indian mohalla have resonances with work on other marginalized spaces, including some dealing with conviviality. In their recent article, Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham detail the Muslim enclave of Lakemba in Sydney and an apartment block in Singapore composed of a diverse Asian population.Footnote 26 They focus on ‘transversal enablers’—those who actively seek to build connections across difference, forms of intercultural gift exchange, and what they term ‘intercultural habitus’, one that is built slowly over generations and through encounters, beginning in childhood, which enable negotiation and the accommodation of difference. In Singapore they describe how, within a context of extended coexistence between those of Indian, Malay, Chinese, and other origins, a tacit knowledge and respect for each other's practices and rituals have developed. As with the gullies of Saharanpur's mohallas, Wise and Velayutham's descriptions of corridors in the Singaporean apartment block echo a sense of being ‘thrown together’ and remind us that both informal and formal design can create contexts that embody the potentiality for conviviality, whether actively intended by the designer or not. They also ask us to think beyond long-discussed notions of civility by attending to ‘embodied, habitual, sensuous and affective’Footnote 27 factors that give conviviality a duration beyond place and moment.
Their article makes an effective case for focusing on everyday forms of multiculturalism and conviviality. However, the ethnographic section that follows picks this up—not from these more theoretical contributions, but from the description of the role of those engaging in ‘bridging and connecting work’. In Sydney's Lakemba district Wise and Velayutham cite the case of Mrs Nazar, an Indonesian restaurant owner. For the authors, she is the ideal embodiment of a convivial bridge-builder and ‘cultural representative’:
[She is one of those…] charismatic individuals who make people feel welcome, start conversations and build connections. In other words, there are both cultural and personal dimensions to her bridging work. On the one hand, it is the space of her restaurant that brings diverse people together […] Mrs Nazar's vocal presence knits her customers together into something more collective and convivial, and she explicitly works at reducing tensions and bridging difference.Footnote 28
What the authors miss from their descriptions of Mrs Nazar's convivial nature is the ‘performed’ element. It is, after all, in her interests to ensure that her customers feel welcome and experience a convivial atmosphere so that they continue to frequent her establishment. As well as not dealing with degrees of instrumentality, the focus is also drawn away from the economic context within which everyday lives in marginal urban spaces are bound up. The city and its associated forms of conviviality do not sit within a clearly segregated spatial context of city, neighbourhood, and private sphere. Rather, as with urban scale itself, spaces of everyday conviviality are part of a broader fabric that interconnects individual, mundane forms of interaction to the national, the global, and the international.Footnote 29 It is to these dualities inherent within conviviality, particularly in its ‘performed’ form, along with detail regarding the specific historical context and vernacular understandings of conviviality, to which the following ethnographic section now turns.
Saharanpur's mohallas: from everyday conviviality to international supply chain
Saharanpur is a city of two halves, defined through spatial and social segmentation. The main railway line, running through the centre, marks the divide between the two. Court Road and the neighbourhoods to the south present a relatively ‘formal’ and affluent face. Government enclaves and offices are located here and the thoroughfares are lined by shopfronts donned with corporate imagery and glass facades. The streets are well maintained and encroachments by shop owners and others are kept in check. These neighbourhoods contain few of the city's Muslims. The area immediately to the north of the railway line consists of a more mixed environment where mosques, temples, and gurdwaras sit in close proximity. It also tends to be the primary site of conflict when tensions arise, often around struggles for space. In July 2014, during a return visit to the city, one such incident occurred. The Singh Sabha Gurdwara, located close to the railway station, had purchased some land to expand its facilities. However, a former Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) claimed that the land was in fact owned by the waqf board of a local masjid (mosque). On 26 July violence erupted and both parties engaged in clashes across the city, in which three people died. During an earlier period of fieldwork colour thrown at a masjid during the Hindu festival of Holi triggered another period of communal trouble. Such moments may be ignited by specific flashpoints. However, they are also the result of a deeper set of tensions that reside beneath the surface of everyday life in the city. This is bound up in a long history of communal tensions and, most significantly, the events of partition. However, there was also a sense among many of the mohalla’s residents, particularly older individuals, of decline as well as a nostalgia for a lost ‘golden age’, an affective sense that has been documented in many of North India's Muslim craft industries.Footnote 30
The north of the city is also the location for the city's Muslim mohallas. These neighbourhoods stand in stark contrast to those in the south and see little of the infrastructure investment and state presence of other areas. The mohallas are also home to the city's large woodworking industry which ranges across production sites, from large factories to small workshops, individual craft workers and homeworkers. It is this space, and its associated mohalla of Hasan Nager, that provides the location for much of the ethnographic material presented in this article.Footnote 31 Like so many others in Saharanpur, the gully (lane/alleyway) was filled with constant tapping from the chisels and hammers of carvers and carpenters. This was layered against the drone of cutting and buffing machines which filled the air with noise and sawdust. The gullies were regularly interspersed with masjids from which the call to prayer provided the only cessation in the otherwise continuous soundscape of production. The entrance to Hasan Nager was dominated by the showrooms of wholesalers and exporters who, along with some large factories, linked into the multifaceted domestic and international supply chains. The shopfronts of the workplaces that supplied them opened onto the street and a glance inside revealed the various stages of production in which each specialized. These highly interconnected workspaces formed a social realm in which informal relations were built, as tea and conversation was shared.
The mohallas both foster conviviality, a result of spatial arrangements that ferment intense forms of (gendered) sociality, and are themselves shaped through convivial relations. Nigel Thrift describes conviviality as being about the emotional and affective make-up of urban space, shaped through the rhythms and patterns of the everyday,Footnote 32 as opposed to being expressly about ‘multicultural otherness’.Footnote 33 The narrow gullies that made up most of Hasan Nager were filled not just with the woodworking workshops but also chai stalls, small eateries, general provision stores, small shops, masjids, and an ever-increasing proliferation of gyms. The occupants of the workshops tended to coalesce into groups who shared similar interests, spaces of sociality, and convivial exchange. Workshop owners, middlemen, wholesalers, and exporters all utilized conviviality not just to get on with those of differing status or position but also as means of cementing relations of production which were built not just on trust and reciprocity, but also on obligation and duty. A convivial and apparently social exchange may often be just as much about forging a connection through which production is enabled, ensuring the completion of an order or the payment of outstanding money, as it is about bridging or civility-building work.
This is not to situate the gullies as a utopian ideal free of tension—as Nowicka and Vertovec suggest ‘conviviality and conflict lie close to each other’.Footnote 34 Tensions could flare up and convivial relations between friends, neighbours, and others could erupt into moments of aggression and even violence. Yet there was a sense of what Doreen Massey terms ‘thrown togetherness’,Footnote 35 which is deeply rooted in the history of the city and in spatial pressures that have pushed together somewhat disparate groups of Muslims within the mohallas. The city was seen as something of a safe haven during 1947 and saw an influx of Muslim refugees of various classes, biraderis, and backgrounds from other areas of the country, as well as Hindus from Pakistani Punjab. Faisal,Footnote 36 an old friend in the Hasan Nager, recalls:
My father and uncle came to Saharanpur from Yamuna Nagar. At that time the Yamuna River was full and they came by swimming. My uncle and father lived in the forest on the river bank of the Yamuna as they were fearful. They had no relatives or link in Saharanpur. They met some people who told them ‘let's go to Saharanpur as there are many Muslims there, you will be safe’. They met in Yamuna Nagar and they told them to come as Saharanpur was safe for Muslims. Finally, my father and uncle arrived here and many Muslims helped them. Some gave food and others clothes, many helped them and my father and uncle also married in Saharanpur.Footnote 37
Saharanpur became a safe haven due to its location as a major rail junction en route to newly partitioned Pakistan but also because the city, unlike some others in the region, retained much of its native Muslim population. Here, Maulana Husain Ahmed, a scholar of a nearby Deoband madrasa, played a crucial role. Having travelled from Deoband he gave a famous speech at the city's Jamma Masjid, declaring ‘Do not go! This our country … we are safe here!’Footnote 38 The influence of the maulana of Deoband was such that many who had been preparing to depart changed their minds, ensuring sufficient security to attract others fleeing the bloodshed and providing sustenance and shelter to the influx of Muslim refugees. The compassion shown to those arriving in Saharanpur by existing Muslim residents was often mentioned in the accounts of partition I collected. It was also very much a part of contemporary thinking on what defines a sharīf (honourable) person and how mehman (guests/others) should be treated. The mass of refugees, who comprised those of various classes and biraderis—from artisans and labourers to the educated middle classes—initially took up residence at the roadsides and empty grounds but gradually became more integrated within the local population.
Attending to this historical context also steers us towards a consideration of the affective terrain of the mohalla in more vernacular terms. Convivial translates roughly into Urdu as milansaar (affable/sociable/amiable/neighbourly/courteous). However, understanding the affective context requires more than a crude translation. Margrit Pernau's seminal work detailing the ‘history of emotions’ among North Indian Muslims provides a foundation for beginning to unpack conviviality in Saharanpur's mohallas.Footnote 39 She reflects on an article published in 1880 in the Tahzibu-l Akhlaq,Footnote 40 which begins with a question as to the nature of Allah's gift which gives ‘… men an enthusiasm (josh) for meeting others and establishing bonds’.Footnote 41 The author, Pernau continues, draws on both Islamic and Enlightenment traditions to locate this within affective notions of love and compassion (muhabbat/hamdardī), emotions which, while naturally produced, must also be cultivated to ‘form the basis of civilisation’.Footnote 42 Although not identical in conceptualization to the notions of conviviality, which takes space rather than the individual as its starting point, it is a pertinent reminder that attempts to cultivate certain forms of relatedness, ways of bridging difference and building community, are not confined to the Euro/American context.
The account provided by Pernau is primarily focused on compassion and civility among Indian Muslims that bridge divides of class, status, or hierarchy, and counters the perceived decline of Muslim influence following British colonialism and the failed uprising of 1847. However, there are also interventions aimed more specifically at bridging beyond the Muslim community. During a speech given in Delhi in 1938, Maulana Husain Ahmed, who had appealed to the crowd to remain in Saharanpur, argued in support of the idea that Islam in India was compatible with ‘composite nationalism’, a concept that envisioned a united and independent India which was embodied within the fabric of the state's ideas of co-dependency and conviviality between various faiths. While recognizing certain problematic areas, the maulana argued that:
… The assumption that Islam and its adherents cannot confederate and interact with any other system is unacceptable. Although Islamic jurisdiction and sharia contains written views on several matters, there remain uncountable things that are allowed, and in which each person is free to act upon as per his own expediency. Among these are kingdoms, their ordinances and organisations [… the British] do not want Muslims to participate in composite nationalism and become a united force in launching the freedom struggle that may prove the catalyst in overthrowing the British government.Footnote 43
Both these narratives are present today and can be witnessed and felt through ethnographic engagement with the mohalla and its residents. However, just as with Mrs Nazar in Sydney, both the local history of scholarly intervention and current everyday forms of conviviality are not disconnected from more instrumental concerns, intersections with the socio-economic position of North Indian Muslims, or the impact of global supply chains that have become pervasively embedded within the woodworking mohallas. As Margrit Pernau points out regarding ‘compassion’, […it] is a social emotion but not necessarily an unequivocally benign emotion. It serves to construct a community and to negotiate boundaries, but it is also a tool of exclusion and helps fortify the communities’ internal hierarchies’.Footnote 44
While this history forms an important part of unpacking conviviality among the mohalla’s Muslim residents, significant bridge-building work also takes place beyond the Muslim community. As with the everyday conviviality of the mohalla, this too was layered within a broader context of business, production, and network-building. In the summer of 2011 FaisalFootnote 45 and I sat in his small rented room above a workshop. Outside his children played while his wife and eldest daughter ate, having served us a meal of mutton korma and roti some time before. Faisal explained that his son Yusuf was working in the house of Sushil, a well-off Hindu who lived in the Court Road neighbourhood across the railway line. He was keen that we made the trip across the city to see him and explained that he had been telling Sushil about me and that Sushil wanted to meet me. I was a little unwilling, having barely recovered from a trip back from Delhi, but eventually agreed to drive us on my motorbike. The visit led to a series of convivial exchanges in which Faisal and I would make the journey across the city and enjoy the hospitality and food provided by Sushil and his wife. Likewise, Sushil made trips to visit us in the mohallas. Bano, Faisal's wife, prepared vegetarian food which Sushil was happy to eat, despite Brahman rules around pollution. Faisal, always keen to have guests in the house, was pleased with the developing relationship. The trips took us across lines of demarcation that intersected the city and bridged bounds of religion, class, and caste.
In the years following my fieldwork I often returned to stay with Faisal and his family. On one occasion Sushil took both of us to visit his large farm situated 30 kilometres beyond the city. For Faisal, the visit to the farm left him in a somewhat contradictory position. On the one hand, he was there as a guest and recipient of the hospitality offered by Sushil, but he was unsure about how to negotiate cultural norms of status and caste that were deeply engrained within both social and spatial aspects of the village context. He hovered at the door as we entered the house and was hesitant as to whether to sit on the sofa or squat nearby. Conviviality had been enabled by bridge-building across difference, but power and hierarchy were still patently present. For Faisal, too, there was more to this relationship than conviviality alone. His own goals were not necessarily those of the bridge-builder seeking interreligious solidarity but were also tied up with economic networking that he hoped would result in accessing work in the more affluent neighbourhoods. Faisal was frank about these intentions and expressed his gratitude that he had been able to utilize my presence to establish links in an area to which his access would usually have been limited.Footnote 46
Although the mohallas were ostensibly Muslim, there were also some Hindu families living among the gullies and workshops. In the neighbourhood of Ali-ki-chungi I met Gurmeet. Originally from Gujarat and of Punjabi origin, her family had lived in the neighbourhood since before partition. The family had been successful in establishing a wholesale business, drawing on the skills and labour of their Muslim neighbours to facilitate manufacturing. As with men in the more public areas of the bazaar, maintaining networks of production required constant reinforcement through convivial acts. I spent some weeks working with women in a neighbouring house who supplied Gurmeet. Faiza, the matriarch, was a headstrong woman in her late fifties, who in turn ran a network of other Muslim women in the neighbourhood. In the run-up to Eid, Gurmeet was careful to convey her best wishes and reinforce the sense of connectedness between the two houses by sending sweets for the breaking of roza (fast). The public spaces of the gully, and other ‘tools of conviviality’,Footnote 47, Footnote 48 acted as locations that enabled the ‘interweaving of ethnically different private spheres’.Footnote 49 Yet there were distinct limits to this, limits that continued to be defined by religious difference and contrasted with the constant to-ing and fro-ing between the Muslim households of the gully, as Gurmeet described:
I have a fixed lady for my work (Faiza). I cannot go directly in their homes but I just call her on the phone and ask her to come and take the work. Not just one person can complete one box, it is a big procedure and one box goes in many hands for work. Only after this will it be complete. Some people cut the box, some finish it and some pack it. Faiza is very important for me as she can organise all the Muslim women in the gully and ensure the work is completed on time.Footnote 50
While convivial acts of gift exchange underscored the relationship between the two women, conviviality constantly intermingled with work, labour, and production, creating slippages between gift giving and commodity extraction.Footnote 51 It is critical, then, to move beyond an examination of conviviality that is overly grounded in the ‘local’ and thus risks becoming prematurely celebratory. In the context of the mohallas, everyday forms of conviviality not only contain degrees of instrumentality, but also feed into global chains of supply and act to mediate control over labour by establishing forms of obligation and mutual interdependence. At times these tensions become exposed. Just as Gurmeet engaged in convivial exchanges to maintain her connection to Faiza, so Faiza constantly reinforced her connections to other Muslim households in the gully to cement her own position as an informal supervisor of production. However, there was an awareness among those receiving her convivial approaches that her interests were bound up in instrumental concerns. Bano, a nearby resident, recalls the moment when her relationship with Faiza broke down:
I have left her work as we have to do 100 boxes in a day and get just 10 rupees for that. ‘Hamara wasta kahtam’ [our relationship is finished]. Why should we do hard work for only 10Rs? […] She is also very poor and has many problems, we know this. She is the senior lady in this area and is head in the gully. She is a very clever lady and when she has lots of work she comes in our house and says that she has lots of urgent orders […but] she gets the benefit and is making a fool of our family.Footnote 52
Significant for reiterating vernacular understandings of conviviality, is Bano's use of the term wasta. Drawn from Arabic but widely used in Urdu, wasta describes trust and reciprocity-based networks ‘reinforced by Islam's emphasis on family, social solidarity […] and mutual assistance’.Footnote 53 It is about being connected in order to get things done and involves building social networks that are as much about long-term investment as they are about more immediate forms of reciprocity. However, it also acknowledges that sociality, civility, and conviviality are bound up with power, influence, and forms of social capital.Footnote 54 Even in relations where conviviality and compassion should occur most ‘easily’ or ‘naturally’ (kin and friends, for example), there are still forms of obligation, instrumentality, and economy present. These may or may not be seen as a problem: wasta merely recognizes their presence but does not judge the morality of a diverse set of consequences. Thus, it was not just a convivial, social, or business relationship that Bano had terminated but also a set of obligations and power-laden reciprocity that are recognized as being embedded in all social relations.
The informal mohalla neighbourhoods, the sense of ‘thrown togetherness’,Footnote 55 and the intense forms of sociality shaped within this spatial context actively produced relations of conviviality reflective of those found in more normative renderings. Types of ‘bridging work’ were also present, extending across difference, both within the mohalla and beyond real or imagined ‘borders’. However, just as with Wise and Velayutham's account of Mrs Nazar, Faisal, Faiza, Gurmeet, and others were also ‘performing conviviality’ to further interests that act to bridge differences but may not be explicitly intended to do so by the bridge-builders themselves. The salience and strength of conviviality is produced in a non-bounded context that is intersected not only by the social but also by the economic and instrumental. However, the ‘performed element’ of convivial exchange is not limited to self-interest alone. Conviviality, as a means of negotiating difference, inherently involves unequal relations of power and can be key to maintaining ‘internal hierarchies’.Footnote 56 In the following section I push my theorization of ‘performed elements’ of conviviality further by attending to the subjective level and subtler forms of ‘performance’ which become embodied as much in what is ‘not said’ and what is ‘not enacted’ as it does within what is ‘said and done’. To do so I begin with spatial conceptualizations of the margin and trace this through to a ‘border’ or ‘marginalized subjectivity’. This, I argue, intersects at the level of everyday interaction to produce forms of silence that add another layer of ‘performance’ to conviviality.
‘Bordering’ the mohalla: from the state to the subjective
The ‘margin’, as a conceptual space, can be conceived of as comprising areas on the fringes of the nation-state,Footnote 57 spaces and places ‘situated at the margins of the political order’.Footnote 58 Margins can be seen as constituting the ‘non-privileged’, with such groups often seeking salvation in ‘non-state’ sourcesFootnote 59 or more ‘traditional’ or ‘charismatic’ forms of authority. Margins may also provide a place of refuge, self-governance, and progressive forms of anarchic social organization.Footnote 60 However, Veena Das and Deborah Poole illustrate the blurred nature of ‘margins’ where, at times, informal actors perform outside the law but also appeal to the law.Footnote 61 To varying degrees, the mohallas embody this ‘greyness’. They provide a sense of security from a potentially threatening ‘other’ and from a ‘Hindustani’Footnote 62 state often seen as dubious or even hostile. Simultaneously, however, the state provides the main source of claim-making and is regularly appealed to for interventions, welfare, and security.Footnote 63
Nonetheless, there remains a sense of distancing from the state. At times this could be explicit, but it also played out in subtler ways. Islam was a neighbour of Faisal, who, as with Faisal and many others in the mohalla, regularly migrated to other parts of the country for work. Whenever he left, Islam was sure to take his Pehchan Patra (voting card), which was essential as it also functioned as an identity card.Footnote 64 In part, he took it for practical reasons. However, for Islam and other migrants from the mohallas, the card carried additional meaning beyond enabling modalities of migration. It was as much associated with showing ‘who you were not’ as it was with showing ‘who you were’. A Muslim without some form of identification in India quickly becomes a suspicious figure, a point Islam emphasized: ‘If the police catch any Muslim and he does not have all cards, then they will say “he is a terrorist”. But if a Hindu is arrested they will never say this.’Footnote 65 Here subtler forms of marginality play out. Regarding mohalla neighbourhoods in Varanasi, Philippa Williams suggests that while an absent or inaccessible state allows us to situate ‘margins’ in relation to the state, we should also examine a more emotive level constituted through ‘feelings of alienation and of being at the edge of the politics that mattered’.Footnote 66
Similar debates have been core to literature on ‘borders’. Hastings Donnan and Dieter Haller, for example, argue that border populations, although geographically marginal to ‘the centre’, are, through their very locality on the fringes of nations, active in shaping and defining states themselves.Footnote 67 Yet here too, a sense of ‘being marginal’ persists. As with the mohallas, spatial exclusion and socio-economic or political marginalization are often experienced by those living close to, on, or across borders. Jason Cons focuses on a border enclave, or chhitmahal, which is constituted as Bangladeshi territory but is surrounded on all sides by land belonging to India.Footnote 68 Those residing in the enclave found themselves in a permanent ‘state of exception’ as they were simultaneously unable to access the legal and citizenship rights of Bangladesh or India, thus rendering them vulnerable to exploitation and violence perpetrated by both the Indian state and local Indian citizenry.
Assigning a permanent ‘state of exception’ to the mohallas, within the terms defined by Cons or Agamben, would obscure the forms of citizenship that are enacted by residents; however, there are degrees of exception present. The notion of being apart yet within, as with Cons' chhitmahal, is often articulated within the community. Cons' informants saw the border as a divide between nations, but they also ‘imagined’ the border as more, specifically as a divide between Hindus and Muslims. However, ethnographic work has revealed how borders, including those that separate nation-states, are not necessarily rigid, fixed entities but are also constituted through everyday performances of power, observation (as either observer or observed), security, and governance,Footnote 69 which are engaged with, contested, and shaped by agentive local actors in various ways.Footnote 70
In the context of the Line of Control (LoC) between Ladakh in India and Pakistan, Ravina Aggarwal has described the processes that underpin and maintain borders as being constituted through the emergence of a ‘border subjectivity’ which is not only created by the material construct—the border—but also through everyday performances.Footnote 71 Here, the border becomes a constant frame of reference within language, cultural practice, and even religious ceremony:
… the state repeatedly exerts physical and symbolic authority over its citizens, particularly over hybrid zones and migrant bodies that contaminate dominant notions of purity and unsettle orderliness […] because border crossings and lines of purity are carefully screened and tightly regimented, citizens of these interstitial spaces can become even more disenfranchised from the mainstream or else totalitarian in their defence of it.Footnote 72
This notion of the border beyond the border—a sense of ‘border-ness’—has been discussed elsewhere. Olga Demetriou traces the border between Turkey and Greece to the Muslim-minority community in Greece, whom she sees as a ‘bordered population’, one that is confined through governmental technologies but is also involved in forms of ‘counter-conduct’.Footnote 73 Consequently, the border exists in a constant process of construction and contestation. It is made and remade ‘… rendering its “border-ness” not an essence, but rather a quality […] Counter-conduct stemming from the state's processes of producing difference […] is what destabilizes the border so that we may see it analytically as more than just a line.’Footnote 74 Within this article the focus is less on how state policy, practice, and technologies of governmentality produce ‘border subjectivities’; instead it explores how ‘border subjectivity’ is negotiated within everyday conviviality across axes of difference.
In Saharanpur, there are concrete forms of border-making conducted by non-state actors, although these are entangled with state processes. On the edge of Hasan Nager sits a small fenced public park with some scrappy grass and a children's playground. The amenity was put in as a wealthier, primarily Hindu, neighbourhood began to develop on land adjoining the mohalla. Spaces such as parks, roadsides, and markets may enable conviviality, but they also contain multiple potentialities for ‘danger and pleasure, segregation and communitas, sincerity and irreverence’.Footnote 75 For some years the park was utilized by both communities but in the spring of 2016 a residents’ committee in the adjoining neighbourhood began campaigning to have those residing in Hasan Nager excluded from it. Familiar articulations of othering were evoked: unruly behaviour and the threat posed by the oversexualized Muslim ‘other’ to women and girls whose modesty and chastity must be protected, formed the primary argument. In turn, this act of border-making was contested by residents of the mohalla.
Young men and boys, in particular, sought to resist the new boundary. In the summer of 2016 Faisal's son Yusuf and I pulled up by the park on my motorbike to call at his friend's place. The friend was not home but our conversation quickly turned to the contested space. Yusuf described how a few weeks earlier some boys from the mohalla had been chastised by residents of the neighbouring area for being in the park. That night an unauthorized lock was placed on the gate by the residents’ committee. However, this only acted to increase the number of boys hanging out in the park after dark. Prior to the incident, the park was a space of little interest to the mohalla boys, who would only occasionally go there. However, the arrival of the padlock had reconfigured the park as a site of contestation and now many climbed the gate at night to resist the new border. The state, then, is active in shaping an imagined border, but it is also constituted through everyday politics that posit the ‘civilized’ outside (or inside, as with gated communities) against the residents of another space. At the time of writing, the residents’ committee's appeals to the state to legitimize their bordering practice had gone unheeded and the spatial contestation remained unresolved.
Throughout my fieldwork I lived a few doors away from the family of Mehboob, Sabeena, and their two sons. They had fallen on hard times after the closure of Mehboob's wood workshop some years before.Footnote 76 Mehboob moved into hosiery but was only able to earn a small income. Sabeena had moved to Saharanpur from a hill station for the marriage. Born into tailoring, Sabeena and her paternal family always sought to improve their position and had an ethic of education as a measure of status. However, the move to the city, where spatial segregation and forms of bordering were more intense than in the hills, soon became an obstacle. Sabeena's ‘outsider’ positionality made her particularly aware of bordering practices. She often reflected on the different ‘feeling’ between city and hills, describing more convivial relations between Muslims and Hindus in her previous home. The family was originally from Saharanpur, hence the ongoing connection, only moving to the hills in the 1930s. Despite Sabeena's feelings, it was Saharanpur, as with Faisal's story of his father's swim down river, that provided a haven for the family during partition. Sabeena recalled her father's stories of being taken as an infant by her grandfather as they fled to the city, hidden under clothes in a bus.
The family's story, like that of many others, was intertwined with broader histories of communal tension and violence. However, Sabeena's own position was also affected by her status as a relative ‘outsider’. This set her somewhat apart from other mohalla dwellers. It also meant that navigating the complexities of Saharanpur's communal spatial context was not as naturalized for Sabeena as it was for locals. Shortly after marriage, during better financial times, the family had attempted to move to a neighbourhood near Court Road, hoping that it would offer more opportunities and better schooling. They purchased a property but were confronted by the local residents’ association and told that Muslims were not welcome. Eventually they sold the property at a loss and returned to the mohalla. Despite this, Sabeena was vociferous in her defence of the need to build cross-community relations and ensured that her children respected Hindu holy days and understood their significance. Sabeena herself honoured such days with gifts and social calls. She fostered close friendships with Hindu families within and beyond her neighbourhood and encouraged other Muslims to do likewise, a process she saw as key to being a ‘modern’ Muslim.
This bridging work was carried out despite material forms of bordering and marginalization. However, there were also subtler ways in which a bordered or marginalized subjectivity played out within otherwise mundane convivial moments. On occasion, I accompanied Sabeena to collect her children from school. Despite the high fees and a journey across town, Sabeena had been determined to send her children to a good school. The institution they attended was mainly used by Hindu families and some of the city's small Christian community. The playground provided a convivial space where parents would chat, share stories, and discuss aspirations for their children. On one trip, we sat chatting to Manju, another parent, at the edge of the playground. Manju turned to me and said ‘I am glad you know Sabeena; she is a good person. In that area [the Muslim mohallas] there are so many bad people and many criminals or people making trouble. Only some like Sabeena are good so you must be careful there.’ Sabeena smiled, nodded convivially, and with an awkward laugh responded, ‘Yes, we try to be good hosts.’ Only after returning did she express her frustration at Manju's association of Muslims with violence and criminality. She had wanted to respond but was forced to remain silent so as not to cause a scene and jeopardize her sons’ education. It was just one moment in a more complex picture, but it was one that brought together various processes of marginality, bordering, othering, and a particular set of power relations—factors which coalesced to insert silence into a convivial exchange.
Sabeena fits the mould of the idealized convivial actor, a point reinforced by her own articulations of difference in the city as being surmountable, challengeable, and bridgeable. However, for Sabeena even mundane moments of conviviality intersected with scales beyond that of immediate spatial concerns. Silence is symbolic of power but it is also an overt form of self-governance. For Demetriou, the border wound its way into the subjectivities of Muslim communities in Greece.Footnote 77 As with Demetriou's work, in Saharanpur ‘technologies of governmentality’ acted to create a border beyond the border. Even an imagined border has its own forms of materiality which act upon and within people in the everyday. However, Sabeena's interaction in the school playground is illustrative not just of governmental technologies but also of more informal forms of bordering that play out within everyday social relations and embed themselves in forms of interaction, both convivial and unconvivial. It was a ‘border’ or marginalized subjectivity, produced within Sabeena, through these intersecting processes, that led to her ‘convivial performance’ and rendered her ‘silent’.
Conclusion
This article has explored conviviality and silence in the city through an engagement with everyday life in Saharanpur's Muslim mohallas. The article has illustrated the importance of considering conviviality within a context that attends to scale and explores what may be hidden within mundane convivial exchanges. Utilizing the notion of ‘performed conviviality’, the article has done this on two counts. First, it has explored the forms of instrumentality, economy, and obligation that are embedded in convivial exchanges. The ethnographic material is illustrative of the ways in which these factors are present within, and producing of, degrees of conviviality. In this context, the article has also illustrated the importance of considering conviviality within spatial scales beyond the ‘local’. Conviviality can be essential in maintaining labour relations—particularly in contexts where work, labour, production, and sociality constantly intermingle—thereby ensuring production is sustained and supply chains satisfied. Secondly, the ethnography has illuminated the ways in which convivial exchanges may be silencing of underlying tensions. In order to understand the production of silence in conviviality, the article has traced processes of bordering and marginalization, from the spatial to the subjective level. While the article has drawn attention to limitations within the potentiality of conviviality, attending to the ‘performed’ element has acted to nuance rather than dismiss the convivial by providing a reminder that attention must be paid to broader spatial scales and to political economy as well as to the subjective level.
