ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Indian Muslim youth’s desires and practices of consumption to inflect the debate about potential links between consumption, identity and emergent politics with fresh nuances. The argument is polarised between positions that view consumption practices as critical to both citizens’ expectations and rights in democratic societies, and others which critique euphemisms of agency attributed to consumerism and view consumption practices as being more essential to the survival of late capitalism. However, in the contexts where citizens are primarily addressed as consumers, as in neoliberal India, this chapter argues that practices of consumption often confer visibility to a hitherto marginalised, minority, and disregarded population. The presence of Muslim youth in new spaces of desire challenges their enforced invisibilities just as their aspirations for new life styles and products inadvertently stake their claim as citizens and counter arguments about consumerism as the dissipation of political agency.
Keywords: minority, Muslims, consumerism, citizenship, rights, modernity
