Religious media infrastructures and the right to the city in Twelver Shi‘i Mumbai

Abstract

Also in India’s economic capital, Islamic foundations and civil society organizations have taken over basic roles in providing welfare, housing, healthcare, and education in Muslim neighbourhoods. In the paper, I focus on a different dimension of religious infrastructures, Islamic media networks and their role in shaping Indian urbanity. In the Mumbai neighborhood of Dongri, the Twelver Shi‘i media center World Islamic Network (WIN) operates a cable and satellite television production facility along with an elaborate website from which its programs along with a host of other Twelver Shi‘i devotional videos and sermons can be streamed. WIN does not just engage in Twelver Shi‘i tabligh or more generally produces TV programs and videos that approach world news and everyday social issues from an Islamic perspective. It also plays a key role in articulating Twelver Shi‘is’ right to the city against the background of Muslim exclusion and the questioning of their full citizenship beyond producing and circulating discourse to this effect. It also sustains this right through audiovisual renderings of a Twelver Shi‘i presence that suggest a felt quality of Shia-ness of Dongri and other Mumbai localities with a strong Twelver Shi‘i presence. WIN shapes urbanity in Mumbai through such mediatic production, reproduction, and suggestion of sensory and atmospheric qualities of belonging to the city in a context where ordinary citizenship discourse puts Muslims at a disadvantage.