In 1992, when film historian Richard Schickel, at the behest of the Academy Awards committee, produced a montage based on Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s film clips, he was forced to request footage from the British Broadcasting Corporation and Channel 4 in the UK, as America had none.

Was Ray’s work already a passé “relic of a bygone” or was the presence of universalism—a distinct marker of Ray’s cinema—improbable for the times?

Any discussion on Muslim politics in contemporary India would remain entirely meaningless if two popular, and in a way, conflicting meanings of the term political representation were not taken into consideration. In a more general sense, Muslim representation is evoked as a normative ideal. It is argued that the adequate presence of Muslim MPs and MLAs in legislative bodies ensures the smooth and effective functioning of democratic polity.

Muslims in India are presently enduring a seemingly endless cascade of hate, violence, harassment, and demonization. While studying the ongoing struggle of Indian Muslims, there is a tendency to fall into one of two traps: victimization or romanticization. While the former renders Muslims devoid of all agency, the latter puts a sheen of glorification on what is hardly a winning battle. The reality lies somewhere in the middle.