CSLG organises a lecture by Raphael Susewind

 A number of scholars have argued that discrimination against Muslims in India’s urban housing markets stems from long histories of Hindu-Muslim ‘communal’ violence, and that the resulting antagonism and discrimination against Muslim tenants and home-buyers leads to their permanent ‘ghettoisation’. In such accounts, the state is portrayed as absent and unable to provide ethnic minorities with a sense of security, so that disenfranchised Muslims seek out the ‘safety in numbers’ of segregated and often traditional neighbourhoods, even when urban housing markets provide updated and modern accommodation elsewhere. Based on official property registration data and ethnographic fieldwork in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, I complicate this narrative, focusing on the productive practices of networking and collusion that enable a veritable building boom in ‘traditional’ Muslim neighbourhoods, often underpinned by a specific middle-class morality that replaces ethical concern for solidarity with narrow codes of ‘proper’ conduct. This underlines the importance of intra-group contestation to intergroup conflict, and the limits of purely instrumentalist explanations of communal segregation.