ABSTRACT
Patterns of Muslim settlement in India's urban centres reveal that Muslim groups mostly live in clusters in defined pockets of urban space that are usually set apart from the residential quarters of the dominant community. This chapter traces the trajectory of the Muslim experience in Kolkata from a time when the city's Muslims could be identified as 'distinct sub-communal groups', to the later years when the community's presence in the city became largely confined to heterogeneous congregations of Muslim groups in a few closed neighbourhoods, which increasingly came to assume the character of a 'ghetto'. It briefly foregrounds Kolkata's Muslims within the broader history of Muslim presence in Bengal up to the early decades of the 20th century. The chapter then focuses on Muslim experiences immediately around Partition and Independence and attempts a brief spatial mapping of the community during a time when the boundaries of 'Muslim areas' from those of their Hindu neighbours began to get more sharply delineated.
