ABSTRACT
In 2008, following a series of bomb blasts across the country, Azamgarh, with close to 16% Muslim population, swiftly came to be labelled as the ‘epicentre’ or ‘hub of terror’. This stigmatization was resisted by the residents of Azamgarh by invoking their cosmopolitan past that had produced literary giants such as Rahul Sankrityayan and Kaifi Azmi among others and educational reformers such as Shibli Nomani. The Muslims of this region had gained by the network of educational institutes set up in the early years of the 20th century, which supplied a steady stream of students to universities like AMU and, later, Jamia Millia Islamia. It also opened up routes of migration, first to Bombay and then to the Gulf, which brought in visible prosperity to a section of the populace. However, the area’s wider economic and social linkages were to be later held up as the proof of the region’s implication in a trans-territorial conspiracy. This chapter traces the biographies of three terror accused to explore how Azamgarh’s past comes to be sedimented in the lives of these three, and how the trajectories of development play out in individual lives.
