• Timeline: May 2014 - April 2017
• Funding organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation
   

Abstract

In political discourses as well as in public debates in India, the estimated 250-300 million strong "new middle class" is presented as the epitome of a globalised, modern country. This is often tacitly equated with a Hindu middle class. India's numerous Muslim communities, on the other hand, are treated in public discourses as poor, "backward" and a "social problem". This view is also reflected in the scholarly examination and thus leads to a largely neglected urban Muslim middle class. The project focuses on the transformation of this population group in the course of labor migration to the Middle East and the economic liberalisation of India in the 1990s, in order to analyse the transformation of subjectivities in this context, taking into account their own heterogeneous perspectives.