Articles by Imtiaz Ahmad

Wearing of the veil among the Arabs, much after the spread of Islam, was more a matter of social status than a religious injunction. It was only later, when western colonial rhetoric began touting the veil as an expression of Muslim backwardness, that it began to be seen as a symbol of retaliation against colonial arrogance. Besides, is the opposition to it out of a concern for women's rights or is it a desire to conform to western thinking?

Changing Notions of the Indian Family The Family in India: Structure and Practice edited by Tulsi Patel; Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2005;
IMTIAZ AHMAD The study of the family in India originated at the confluence of the two somewhat dissimilar academic disciplines of history and anthropology joined at a later stage by sociology. Early British investigations into the nature of the family in India were of a legal and practical nature aimed at establishing property rights and the responsibility for the payment of revenue. The anthropological concentration of investigations on the family permitted the view of the family as an institution among others. However, the almost exclusive concentration of anthropological investigations on structures perceived as the unchanging basis of events led to the drawing of a rather static picture. Two significant developments have in the past decades brought dynamism to the study of the family. The first is the deconstruction of historical continuity through empirical observation of behaviour. The second is the reintroduction of history aided by the historicisation of gender. This book, the outcome of the decision of the Indian Sociological Society which completes its silver jubilee this year, to publish selections of essays that appeared in the journal, Sociological Bulletin, on a variety of themes, constitutes an attempt to look at the development of the study of the family in India.

The association of Urdu with Muslims as their mother tongue, a post-independence phenomenon, had damaging consequences for Muslims. It alienated Muslims from areas other than north India from their regional languages and it weakened the case of Urdu for state patronage as facilities for its instruction as part of a secular syllabus could simply not be provided on an all-India level. As this paper points out and what has been seen in other aspects besides Urdu, it was in this aspiration to be an all-India community, they lost sight of what could be achieved regionally or even locally.

in states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. If the small farm system under private ownership is to sustain such a large population, it must become a highly productive enterprise. This will demand community co-operation. "Under conditions of small and fragmented holdings, it becomes essential that fanners carry out some aspects of farm operations, such as water management, plan; protection and post-harvest technology on a watershed basis.... Owing to the lack of appropriate community action, the efficiency of water use is nor as high as it could be, and also that intensity of cropping pattern is much below the desired levels. Plan: protection is poor because of the absence of an area approach in land-use planning and pest control" (p 451), As for agriculture's potential to generate employment, Swaminathan suggests two avenues: multiple cropping and improved post-harvest technology. Data derived from various centres of the All-Inia Agronomic Research Project of ICAR indicate that appropriate crop sequences can generate considerable additional employment. For example, data from Palampur centre (Hima- chal Pradesh) show that labour require- ment goes up from 181 man-days for Maize-Wheat-Fallow sequence to 450 man-days for Rice-Potato-Potato sequence. In Ludhiana, the labour requirements go up from 251 man-days for Maize-Wheat-Maize fodder sequence to 488 days for Maize-Potato-Mung Hean- Pota'o. Improved and enlarged post- harvest operations generate additional employment.

The central argument of this paper is that the explanations often advanced to account for the educational backwardness of Muslims in contemporary India rest upon certain questionable assumptions. These are, one, that Muslims are an aggregate community; and two, that the appeal of education is universal to all social strata. Following from this, if indeed Muslims are educationally backward, it is because of some innate religious conservatism which discourages pursuit of secular education, or because of an acute 'minority complex'.