This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

About the Event
This book proposes a political history of Muslim universities in post-independence India, from 1947 to the 1990s. Based on a wide range of sources in English and in Urdu, it highlights the central role that these educational institutions played in the debates on national integration, secularism, minority rights and Muslim backwardness. After independence, Muslim universities found themselves at a critical juncture between central state authorities and India's Muslim population. As public and Muslim institutions, they were to participate in nation-building as much as in the development of the Muslim 'community'. By closely looking at the relation between these institutions and state authorities, the book teases out the ambiguities of the state's Muslim policy. It also examines, in turn, how university members responded to this policy and developed competing conceptions of Muslim identity and citizenship, which structured the wider public debates on Muslims' status in post-partition India.

About the Speaker
Laurence Gautier is a Researcher in “Documenting Democracy: History, Politics and Citizenship” at CSH.  She holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. Before joining CSH, she taught as Assistant and then as Associate Professor at Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities. Her research examines the debates around Indian Muslims’ position in the nation after partition, as citizens and as a minority group. Her first monograph, Between Nation and Community. Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2024) focuses on the role of Muslim universities as intermediaries between state authorities and the “community”, and as platforms of debates around national integration, minority rights and secularism.

Laurence is also expanding her research work on questions of Muslim leadership and representation in other settings. She co-edited a special issue on ‘Historicizing Sayyid-ness: Social Status and Muslim Identity in South Asia’ (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society). She is currently preparing, along with Julien Levesque (Ashoka University) and Nicolas Belorgey (CNRS, CSH), a prosopographical study of Muslim leaders, which examines the different types of Muslim leadership that emerged after independence, as well as their relations to Indian state authorities. Finally, Laurence is starting a new research project on intermediaries between state actors and religious minorities in India’s secular regime after independence.