Reconstructing Cheraman: Communal Harmony, Lived Secularism and Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Kerala, South India

This paper examines how the Muslims of Kodungallur in contemporary Kerala, faced with the recent rise of Hindu nationalist politics that frequently problematize Muslim belonging in shared sacred and public spaces, engage in a renewed articulation of religious coexistence, primarily through the language of communal harmony [mathasouhardam]. The assertive articulation of communal harmony by the Muslims of Kodungallur is centered around the physical and imaginative space of Cheraman Juma Masjid, which is believed to be the first Mosque in India, established by the legendary king Cheraman Perumal. Moving away from the scholarship that has highlighted the instrumentalist nature of the discourses of communal harmony as an ideological construct of the powerful/dominant/majority communities, the research addresses the question of communal harmony articulated by minorities. Based on the ethnographic material, I argue that communal harmony is evoked to affirm Muslim belonging in three sites- everyday life, historical memory, and the legal-constitutional realm, as a direct response to the Hindu nationalist challenge. The research further addresses the contradictions and ambivalences in the Muslim articulations of communal harmony and locates it within the emerging scholarship on Muslim belongingness and citizenship in contemporary India. Drawing from similar ethnographic studies of other Muslim contexts in India (Williams, 2012; Bigelow2019), the paper further argues that the Muslim articulation of communal harmony constitutes a form shifting sites of secularism towards a search for lived secularism, referring to non-communal ways of living together and ways of mobilizing memories and legends towards claiming substantial belonging, in the larger context of the decline of normative state secularism in India.