Communal living: Religion, class, and the politics of dwelling in small-town Gujarat

India witnesses a proliferation of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ residential areas, which reflect deepening segregation along religious lines. This article explores the production of such spaces through a case study of Anand in central Gujarat. It uses the lens of ‘mobilities’ to critically interrogate the ‘Muslim ghetto’, a notion that has come to figure prominently as a conceptual framework in discussions on residential segregation in contemporary India, and proposes to consider the residential spaces of Muslims instead as ‘hubs’ of urban and regional connectivity. Avoiding a false dichotomy between segregation-as-seclusion and cohabitation-as-connecting, the article demonstrates how new kinds of environments reflect and facilitate new sets of social relations, and generates a fresh perspective of a Muslim area as a hub of intersecting mobilities within a context of rural and urban transformation.