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“Nation at Repair, Women at Work”: Kinship, Dissent, and Citizenship in South India

Harini Kumar

Abstract

From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The Act provides a path to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims. Amid countrywide protests emerged a unique political experience spearheaded by Muslim women: Shaheen Bagh. This article focuses on a protest site in the southern Indian city of Chennai to examine the everyday practices of domestic and ritual life that Muslim women brought to such spaces. It argues that such moments, though seemingly apolitical, also express political and moral will. By contextualizing these protests within a longer history of dissent in the state of Tamil Nadu, this article shows how Chennai Shaheen Bagh lies at the intersection of region and nation, union and federal government. When protesters declare that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the state’s demands to prove one’s citizenship via documents. Although the protests were about a citizenship law, Muslim women were in fact pointing to various modes of belonging that cannot be captured by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.

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Figure 1

Figure 1

Muslim Women Protest the CAA in Chennai: “We will not show our papers. We will not fear oppression” (translation of Tamil text)

Photo by the author

  • 1 According to a press release by the Indian government, “The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 aims (...)
  • 2 For more on the NRC see Raj (2020).
  • 3 For more on the NPR see Venkataramanan (2019).
  • 4 On March 11, 2024, the rules of the CAA were finally released, four years after the Act was passed, (...)

1From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In the CAA, religion is used as a criterion for citizenship for first time in the post-colonial Indian legal landscape.1 The Act provides a path to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims. It is often invoked alongside the National Register of Citizens (NRC)2 and the National Population Register (NPR),3 wherein people are expected to produce documents to prove their parental ancestry in India as a prerequisite to citizenship.4

  • 5 Scholars, journalists, and photographers have documented the impressive range of participants in th (...)

2Anti-CAA protests were held across the country, from Kashmir in northern India to the southernmost city of Kanyakumari on the mainland. Protests were held even further afield in the union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Protesters claimed space by occupying public streets, carrying out marches, and sounding passionate cries against a prejudicial regime. Amid these countrywide protests emerged a unique political experience, the sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in southeastern Delhi that inspired numerous Shaheen Baghs across the country. These sit-ins were largely led by Muslim women, with most of the permanent participants belonging to working-class backgrounds. By drawing upon the vocabulary of constitutionalism, democracy, secularism, and Islam, women were articulating new forms of place-making and religious belonging. Protest sites in different states across India opted to all use the original name—Shaheen Bagh—, marking their solidarity and ties to one another. However, using the name Shaheen Bagh across different sit-ins did not take away from the local characteristics of each space. While Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh has been covered extensively in digital news media, edited books, and scholarly journals,5 other cities have received far less attention.

3This article focuses on one such Shaheen Bagh site in Tamil Nadu’s capital city of Chennai where a sit-in took place for 33 days—between February 15, 2020 and March 18, 2020—until it was forced to shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I visited the site five times during this period, and was particularly struck by the everyday practices of domestic and ritual life—including a wedding and a bangle ceremony—that people brought to the sit-in. At Chennai Shaheen Bagh (CSB), it quickly became evident that conventional understandings of political practice had to be expanded to include seemingly apolitical aspects of religious and social life.

  • 6 Some examples include Muslim women’s involvement in the nationalist movement (Forbes 1996), protest (...)

4In this article, I offer some reflections on what it means to be surrounded by uncertainty and nonetheless create livability through everyday acts of care, solidarity, and kinship. By highlighting these iterative acts, what I call a “practice of politics,” I show how Muslims at CSB articulate belonging amid an overwhelming majoritarian sentiment that perceives them as a theological, cultural, and political problem. I suggest that the enactments of familial and inter-communal rituals not only challenge the new ethno-nationalist citizenship law, but compel us to rethink the grounds of what we normally recognize as dissent. Such practices also oblige us to look beyond the site of the present and acknowledge the longer history of Muslim women’s participation in public and political life on the subcontinent.6

5Here I want to caution against reading the care work that was visible at the sit-ins through the feminized lens of domesticity. Muslim women were not simply bringing their private, domestic lives into the public domain, but through the organic emergence of the protests, they were implicitly challenging the presumed separation of the public and the private in the first place, as well as the distinction between the social and the political. As Amir Mufti notes, “One of the remarkable things about this movement is the way in which the women of Shaheen Bagh, despite their relatively marginal social backgrounds, seemed to have understood that the proposed citizenship policy marked a dramatic shift in the exercise of sovereign power in this constitutional republic that represented a serious danger not only to themselves but in fact to the country as a whole” (2023:177–78).

  • 7 My larger book project is an ethnography of Muslim belonging in contemporary India in a time of agg (...)

6A note on methodology: I have eschewed ethnographic thickness and in-depth interviews to instead provide a horizontal account of dissenting practices that were emergent at CSB. I draw from my observations at CSB, as well as secondary data gleaned from newspapers, television reports, academic articles, and social media, to provide a perspective from Tamil Nadu, a state in India that is often considered peripheral to mainstream nationalist politics yet one that has a robust history of social justice organizing. Since Tamil Nadu has a reputation for having an antagonistic relationship with the Indian nation-state (a prominent example being the anti-Hindi agitations that started in the late 1930s), it offers a unique vantage point from which to consider a national-level movement.7

7I was initially present at the protest site in solidarity with the protesters, not to do ethnographic research. During my first visit to CSB, I was accompanied by a female Muslim friend and her son from another neighborhood in Chennai. I went alone during my other visits, usually walking around CSB to see the various posters and protest art, and later finding a spot to sit for some time, where invariably a casual conversation would emerge with the women next to me. My discomfort with viewing the protest space as a “field site” was primarily due to the ethics of engaging in ethnographic research during a time of heightened police violence against predominantly Muslim and female protesters who were risking their safety each day of the sit-in. While my decision may have foreclosed an opportunity for in-depth interviews and a thick description of what I witnessed (characteristic of ethnographic research methods), it does not preclude bringing an anthropological perspective—as a mode of attention and reflection—to bear on the events. In other words, such a perspective addresses a question at the heart of anthropological inquiry: how should we live, and how should we live with others? As anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes, anthropology is less about knowledge production and more about gaining wisdom (2018). In a similar vein, I ask: what can we learn from the Muslim women at CSB?

8This article proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I situate the CSB protest within a longer history of dissent in modern Tamil Nadu. In recent decades especially, the state has seen consistent resistance against the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I argue that CSB must be understood not only within the larger matrix of Shaheen Baghs across the country, but also contextually within the longer history of activism in Tamil Nadu. CSB therefore sits at this intersection of region and nation, union and State level government. In the next section, I zoom in on the neighborhood of Washermanpet where CSB was located, demonstrating how dissent is spatialized. I show that despite their marginalization, Muslim women’s daily articulations of kinship and solidarity extended beyond Washarmanpet’s boundaries. I then focus on two ceremonies—a bangle ceremony for a pregnant Hindu woman and a Muslim wedding—that took place at CSB, analyzing how we might read the occurrence of such events at a protest site.

Dissent in Tamil Nadu

9Social justice organizing in Tamil Nadu has a long history. In this section, I will give a brief account of activism in the state by highlighting three movements that emerged in the 20th century: the Dravidian Movement, the Dalit Panthers Movement, and the STEPS Women’s Development Organization. While a comprehensive account of activism in Tamil Nadu is beyond the scope of this paper, this section provides a backdrop to the specific practice of politics emergent at CSB. In implicit and explicit ways, protestors and visitors at CSB invoked the longer history of social justice movements in the state, tacking back and forth between localized understandings of solidarity across caste and religious lines, and a national level movement in opposition to the CAA. Important to note here is that Tamil Nadu is one of the few states in India where the BJP (the current ruling party in India) has not managed to make huge electoral gains, even though the two dominant Dravidian parties—the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) and AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam)—have formed political alliances of convenience with the BJP in the past. Hindu nationalism as a form of nativism that privileges Hindu-ness has therefore been slow to gain traction (Manoharan 2024).

  • 8 See Geetha and Rajadurai (1998) for a comprehensive history of the non-Brahmin movement, and Karthi (...)

10In the 20th century, dissent in Tamil Nadu was closely associated with the Dravidian Movement—also known as the Self-Respect Movement (Suyamariyathai Iyakkam) and the non-Brahmin movement—launched in 1926 by E. V. Ramasamy Naicker (popularly known as Periyar).8 It was primarily an anti-caste movement that arose in the period of late colonial rule and early postcolonial nationhood to oppose the cultural and political dominance of upper-caste Brahmins. A unique nexus between a political and ethnolinguistic identity was consolidated in the early 20th century by this movement, stressing the Tamil language and culture as the glue that held people together regardless of their religion or caste. In fact, so deep was this “language devotion” that Tamils were prepared to die through self-immolation for its cause (Ramaswamy 1997).

  • 9 For a critique of the historical exceptionalism of the “geographical south” in opposition to north (...)

11Emerging as a state in 1956, Tamil Nadu has always exercised some autonomy when it comes to its relation to the nation-state, where the notion of Tamil exceptionalism or particularism still has purchase (Pandian 2007; Geetha 2019).9 Minorities such as Tamil-speaking Muslims aligned with the Dravidian movement partly due to the movement’s quest for social justice and egalitarianism, and by extolling the liberatory potential of “self-respect,” one of the ideological pillars of the movement. Influenced by rationalist and atheist discourses, the Dravidian movement did not privilege one religious identity over another. S. M. Abdul Khader Fakhri notes (2008:24) that ideas of Hindu-Muslim unity propagated by early nationalist leaders were “irrelevant to Tamil Muslims because the categories of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ for them were subsumed under a more meaningful regional Tamil identity.”

12While much of the 20th century was dominated by Dravidian politics, with the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly alternating between the DMK and AIADMK parties, Dalit engagement in protest movements began in the 1970s. The 1980s saw the rise of a radical group, the Dalit Panthers Iyakkam (Movement), also known as the Liberation Panthers, and later as the political party, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK or Liberation Panthers Party). Their leader, Thol. Thirumavalavan, is a Dalit activist and politician, and currently a member of parliament from the Chidambaram constituency. The VCK contested elections as a political party for the first time in 1999 and have criticized the two Dravidian parties for failing to root out casteism—especially anti-Dalit violence—from Tamil society (Gorringe 2017, 2005). The VCK has also consistently opposed the CAA, and its cadres visited CSB (and other protest sites across Tamil Nadu) in solidarity with the protesters. During the anti-CAA protests in Tamil Nadu, the ruling party in the state was the AIADMK which had supported the BJP’s passing of the CAA in the national parliament. The DMK, VCK, and other opposition parties in the state criticized the AIADMK’s alliance with the BJP (the AIADMK-BJP alliance ultimately broke apart in 2023). Importantly, protesters at Washermanpet expressed their dissent against the state government as well (and not just the BJP) by demanding that the AIADMK withdraw their support for the CAA.

13The third area of social justice struggle I want to highlight is women’s movements that started gaining momentum from the 1970s onwards. On the heels of national feminist struggles for justice and equality, the STEPS Women’s Development Organization was formed in 1987 by Sharifa Khanam, a Muslim woman from Pudukkottai in southern Tamil Nadu. Their primary focus was gender-based violence, later turning to issues faced by Muslim women in particular such as dowry and triple talaq (instant Muslim divorce). Khanam also founded the Women’s Jamaat (Muslim council or tribunal) in 2004 to address domestic violence, dowry harassment, and other issues faced by Muslim women which were until then resolved only in all-male Jamaats that often failed to see women’s perspectives and hold men accountable (Dhanraj 2011). The Women’s Jamaat became a network of 12,000 members across 12 districts in Tamil Nadu, helping settle numerous cases of injustice against women.

  • 10 I have omitted other important social justice and women’s movements for the sake of brevity. For ex (...)

14In August 2004, over two hundred and fifty Muslim women in the city of Madurai partook in a sit-in. As feminist scholar V. Geetha notes, “the sit-in was more than a protest against specific injustices. The very air that day was alert with the women’s gaiety, anger and resolve, and resonant with their insistence that their Islam required [that] women be treated with dignity, equality and granted the freedom that was theirs” (2018:138). While the country-wide Shaheen Bagh protests in 2020 were tied to a different set of demands, the emotions, resolve, and feminist solidarity that I witnessed were similar. In both instances, women’s labor was intimately connected to a practice of politics. Also visible at CSB were diverse women’s activist groups—Christian, communist, and Left among others—who regularly visited the sit-in to show their solidarity.10

  • 11 Dakhni, a language that combines Urdu with various south Indian languages (as well as Marathi), has (...)

15Chennai Shaheen Bagh, therefore, was influenced by both a nation-wide movement primarily led by Muslim women as well as a regional history of dissent that was strongly associated with early Dravidian ideals of social justice and equality. This was evident in the numerous slogans in Urdu, Tamil, and English, and in the speeches made by women at CSB. The protesters themselves came from diverse linguistic backgrounds; while many were Tamil-speakers and plugged into the nuances of Tamil oratory, political life, and activism, many working class residents of Washermanpet were Dakhni speakers (not to be confused with the Urdu-speaking elite of Chennai and northern Tamil Nadu) who were also fluent in Tamil.11 Above all, they were Muslim women, sitting side by side with women of different faiths and movements, working toward a shared ideal. The next section moves to the specific site of CSB in Washermanpet, north Chennai, to analyze the spatial politics of dissent and its transformative potential.

Gender and the Spatializing of Dissent

16Spatial and political concepts such as “nation” and “homeland” have historically been viewed through a gendered lens, including through gendered language such as “motherland” and “fatherland” to describe an imagined place. Anne McClintock, for example, has argued that “Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space” (1993:63). In a related vein, Sumathi Ramaswamy has examined how the notion of Bharat Mata or “Mother India,” wherein patriotism was depicted in the female form, often as a Hindu goddess embodying the sovereign territory of the nation, emerged in the late 19th century. This marked the “easy convergence of ‘India’ with ‘Hindu’ from nationalism’s earliest moments on the subcontinent” (2010:21). Muslim and lower caste women, however, fell outside of this dominant visual patriotism.

17Another mode of spatializing the nation vis-à-vis gender in colonial India, specifically in Bengal, was by distinguishing between the inner, “spiritual” space of the home which was characterized as female, and the outer “material” space of the world which was male (Chatterjee 2003). In this understanding, the home as the domain of women came to represent India’s “spiritual distinctiveness” and “true identity.” In contrast, “the world” was the domain of men where colonizer/the West and colonized confronted one another. Sharika Thiranagama (2019) has pointed out a major omission in Chatterjee’s text, namely that the “inside” or the home is also a place of caste-based practices as opposed to the classed world Chatterjee describes. In the early 20th century, prominent nationalist figures like M. K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar each had their own vision for development and progress that was rooted in the distinction between village and city. One of the challenges posed by the growing urban built environment was the uneven spatialization of the city and therefore one’s experience of it: “what sets middle-class neighborhoods apart from slums is not time but space; not just physical space but also the space of power” (Prakash 2002:4).

  • 12 Madras (now Chennai) was established in 1639 by the English East India Company as a colonial tradin (...)
  • 13 Cheris are settlements where Dalits have historically resided. They are spatially separated from th (...)

18In this section, I examine how a neighborhood in Chennai, inhabited primarily by lower-castes, Muslims, and Dalits, is transformed by Muslim women’s spatial practices. CSB was located in the neighborhood of Washermanpet (Vannarapettai in Tamil) in North Chennai. According to the 2011 national census, Chennai is the fourth largest city in India with a population of 4.6 million (now estimated to be over seven million), 6 per cent of whom are Muslims of various sects, ethnicities, and mother tongues.12 Chennai, like other metropolitan cities across India, is deeply segregated along caste and class lines (Shaikh 2021; Neild 1979). North Chennai, specifically, has come to be associated with urban slums or Dalit settlements known as cheris, fishing communities, and a working-class population, while South Chennai continues to be an upper-caste (predominantly Brahmin) stronghold.13 As a result of this sharp demarcation, North Chennai is often perceived as a “violent urban ghetto” (Damodaran and Gorringe 2021) and as an area where the ongoing “spatialization of caste” has led to a stigmatized Dalit identity (Diwakar 2022). The spatial context of a city, town, or neighborhood, therefore, also has a bearing on how its inhabitants come to be marked in distinct ways (Cháirez-Garza 2014).

19For instance, scholarly literature on Muslims in Indian cities has shown a trend toward “ghettoization” wherein neighborhoods in large urban centers come to be marked as “Muslim areas” and are largely sequestered from other parts of the city (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012). Newer studies also show that Indian cities continue to be segregated along caste and religious lines, with unequal access to public services further pushing already marginalized communities to the edges (Deuskar 2023). As much as these spaces are necessarily secluded, constrained, and isolated, scholars have also argued that they enable new forms of connectivity, even if limited. For example, in New Lives in Anand, Verstappen attempts to understand Muslim life in Anand, Gujarat, “not from the outside in, but from the inside out” (2022:6). She forgoes the lens of the “ghetto” and instead uses “hub” as an orienting analytical device to describe the world of Anand’s residents and their “continued ability to maintain connections with a variety of people and places: urban and rural, local and transnational, as well as Hindu, Christian, and Muslim” (2022:6).

20Washermanpet in North Chennai was originally settled by people belonging to the Vannar caste (hence the place name Vannarapettai wherein pettai means “locale”), an occupational caste group involved in washing laundry during the colonial period. While it carries the stigmas of ghettoized spaces (with respect to caste, religion, and class), it also transformed during CSB, however briefly, into an outward facing “hub” where women were collectively enacting the world they envisioned, marking their connectedness to people and places beyond their neighborhood. This transformation exemplifies how cheris can become spaces of resistance (Gorringe 2016). Its epicenter, Lalgunda Street (near a major traffic intersection), became CSB after Chennai city police wielded batons (lathis) against hundreds of anti-CAA demonstrators at this site on February 14, 2020, physically injuring and harassing several women (Rao 2020).

21With the express purpose of articulating their demands for equal recognition under the Constitution and voicing their dissent over discrimination based on their religious identity, working-class Muslim women sat at this site for thirty-three days, protesting, praying, preparing meals, giving speeches, and caring for their kin—both those with whom they share old bonds and those with whom the ties are new. Their children were an integral part of the sit-in too, doing their homework, playing, eating, coloring, putting together short theater performances, and writing “NO CAA” in vivid colors on maps of India. Separate prayer halls were also set up for women who wanted more privacy. The CSB Facebook page is a testament to the diverse ways in which protesters engaged with questions of identity, belonging, citizenship, and rights.14

  • 15 It is important to note that protests emerged across the state of Tamil Nadu, even in small towns t (...)

22In interviews with national and local television channels, Muslim women at CSB emphasized nonviolent satyagraha, invoking M. K. Gandhi, while critiquing the unfair demands the CAA-NRC makes on people to produce documents proving their citizenship and ancestral ties to India (see Lal 2023 for an analysis of Shaheen Bagh through the lens of Satyagraha). On the fourth day of the protests, when asked by NDTV journalist Sam Daniels about the significance of these protests, a young Muslim woman responded that although Delhi Shaheen Bagh was the inspiration for CSB (as evidenced by the name), Muslim women at Washermanpet were not merely imitating their Delhi counterparts but were also voicing their genuine concerns about the CAA since it affected them as well. Another woman exclaimed, “This is definitely inspired by Delhi Shaheen Bagh. If they can fight for our freedom, why we can’t? [sic]” Such statements show that Muslim women at Washermanpet were not only keenly aware of the uprising across the country, but wanted to actively partake in the protests despite the risks and personal costs involved.15

Figure 2

Figure 2

Twenty-four days of Chennai Shaheen Bagh

Photograph by Anusha Hariharan

23At CSB, shops lining two streets—Sajja Munusamy Street and Aziz Mohamed Street—were shuttered and posters with numerous slogans in English and Tamil were pasted on them: “nation at repair, women at work” (figure 1), “dissent is democracy,” “India needs education, job, not NRC CAA NPR,” “madha saarbatra nadada, CAA edharka da? #Shaheenpet” (this is a secular country, why do you need CAA?), “aneedhi sattamagumpodhu edhipru namadhu kadamai agiradhu” (when injustice becomes law, opposition is our duty), and “vaazhvurimai porattam: periyar, ambedkar pirandha mannada, jati-in paeral pirikkadhe, naatai naasam akaadhe” (struggle for our right to life: this is the land of periyar and ambedkar, don’t discriminate in the name of caste, don’t ruin our country. See figure 3). Other slogans were voiced in Tamil: Urimai Meetpu Arpattam (agitation to retrieve our rights), Anajamaatom Adangamaatom (we will not fear or back down); Urdu: Inquilab Zindabad (long live the revolution); and a combination of Tamil and Urdu in a single sentence: Makkal Puratchi Zindabad (long live the people’s revolution).

  • 16 At the time of this writing (September 2024), Sharjeel Imam is still in prison.
  • 17 Flower garlands are a ubiquitous symbol in India, present on a wide range of occasions such as wedd (...)

24Every day, the women of Washermanpet were joined by visitors who came to show their support—college students, activists, NGO workers, politicians from various parties, and Christian solidarity groups. Within the first few days, a makeshift dais was set up, shamianas (tents) were erected, and large banners were hung from buildings displaying slogans such as “Save Constitution! Reject Fascism!” and images of anticolonial figures and social reformers such as B. R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhagat Singh, and Sarojini Naidu. The banners also included Tamil icons such as Periyar, Muslim leaders such as Abul Kalam Azad, Syed Abul Ala Maududi, and Muhammad Iqbal, and Bengali feminist writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (see figure 4). Other visual material included posters displaying images of dissenters and activists such as Sharjeel Imam and Akhil Gogoi who are still imprisoned on charges of sedition,16 banners containing the text from the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, as well as a tongue-in-cheek poster of a large garland underneath the words “CAA NRC NPR,” signaling their death knell (figure 5).17

Figure 3

Figure 3

Tamil posters at Chennai Shaheen Bagh

Photograph by the author

Figure 4

Figure 4

Banner at Chennai Shaheen Bagh

Photograph by the author

Figure 5

Figure 5

Garland implying death to CAA NRC NPR

Photograph by the author

25Several political leaders from different parties such as Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), A. S. Fathima Muzaffer of the Indian Union Women’s League, and Dalit leader Thol. Thirumavalavan of the VCK gave speeches, musicians sang songs of dissent, children performed short dramas impersonating national leaders, and local civil society groups and NGOs distributed packets of food and water bottles to the protesters. Some Sikh groups also distributed langar (free meals typically cooked in a communal kitchen). Although people from various political affiliations visited the protest site regularly, the sit-in was not coopted by any group, much like the other Shaheen Baghs across the country.

26Muslim women were not just claiming space but creating place (Menon 2022). By occupying a public space in a “Muslim area,” Muslim women consolidated contiguous political narratives of belonging, reminding us of the necessary emplacements of citizenship, even though the notion of citizenship is itself based on an abstract universalism. As historian Niraja Gopal Jayal has noted, “On the one hand, the idea of citizenship has acquired the status of a universal desideratum; on the other, its very capaciousness often renders it vacuous” (2013:2). The solidarities forged at CSB were therefore rendered through different forms of care—for each other, a community, a place, and diverse minoritized identities. Put differently, while a discriminatory national law was the catalyst for these protests, the women of Washermanpet were creating a site that transcended a singular understanding of place as synonymous with the nation-state. I now turn to two events that occurred at CSB—a valaikapu (bangle ceremony) and a Muslim wedding—that offer us new ways to understand kinship and ritual as they intersect with a socio-political movement.

On “Umbilical Cord Relations,” a Valaikapu, and a Muslim Wedding

27The CAA protests in Chennai were not only intimately tied to specific (and expansive) geographies but also to expressive practices of kinship that were legible to the diverse groups of people assembled at Washermanpet. Places are therefore not simply stable or static physical sites but are actively crafted through practices of kin-making. As Janet Carsten notes through her extensive research on kinship, “it is in the gradual accumulation of everyday experiences through living together over time—in both the ritual and non-ritual moments—that kinship acquires its particular power” (2013:248). Following Carsten, I take kinship to be gradual and processual, as opposed to pre-determined (by birth and procreation), thereby focusing on how kinship is lived and experienced through everyday practices.

  • 18 For differing perspectives on Tamil kinship, see Dumont 1953; Trautmann 1981; Trawick 1992; Clark-D (...)

28Within anthropological scholarship, “Dravidian kinship” (referring to kinship practices and structures among the people of south India) has long been an object of inquiry.18 While an explication of the different perspectives on Dravidian/Tamil kinship is beyond the scope of this paper, I show in this section how Muslim women’s practice of politics at CSB makes possible new ways of thinking about entrenched notions of kinship in social science scholarship. An attention to kinship as both an analytical concept and an empirically observable phenomenon adds another dimension to the dominant framework through which anti-CAA protests have been understood thus far, namely, through the language of democracy, constitutionalism, and secularism.

29For example, anthropologist Julia Kowalski (2020) has observed that the grannies of Shaheen Bagh, as they have affectionately come to be known, “present themselves as representatives of the nation by invoking their status as female kin. They draw on the language of family to describe their relations with fellow protestors.”19 In Chennai’s Washermanpet sit-in, such female solidarity was also embedded in local understandings of ties between communities. Invocations of kinship were commonly heard from various speakers. A Muslim woman who was a regular and passionate speaker often referred to the “thoppil kodi uravu” – translated in Tamil as “umbilical cord relations” – between Tamil people. She was highlighting an idealized Tamil kinship of sisterhood and brotherhood that transcended caste and religious differences. She was also indirectly invoking a longer history of relations between different communities—however fraught—based on friendship, practices such as wet nursing (thai paal uravu), and political comradeship.20

30On February 26, 2020, a Hindu couple decided to use the Washermanpet protest site to hold a bangle ceremony known in Tamil as valaikapu (from the Tamil word valaiyal, meaning bangles, and kapu referring to a protective bracelet), in an act of solidarity with their Muslim kin (Shekar 2020). The function is conducted in the third trimester of a pregnancy wherein female relatives and friends adorn the hands of a pregnant woman with glass bangles. The bangle ceremony is a shared Tamil ritual enacted by Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike and usually performed for a woman’s first pregnancy (similar to the godh barai function in northern India). As a universally recognized Tamil practice, it was embedded in a discursive field already familiar to everyone at the site. An understanding of the social and religious significance of the valaikapu function in the Tamil context is necessary here.

Figure 6

Figure 6

Bangle ceremony (valaikapu) of a Hindu woman at Washermanpet, Chennai

Photograph courtesy The News Minute

  • 21 See Hüsken (2013) for details about Brahmin rituals including valaikapu.

31With the exception of anthropologist Cecilia Van Hollen’s Birth on the Threshold (2003), there are hardly any studies that offer an analysis of the valaikapu function.21 The ethnographic details that Van Hollen provides—devoting a whole chapter to pregnancy rituals—are important for understanding how class, caste, and religion are key factors in how such rituals are enacted. The valaikapu is typically not a religious event but rather a longstanding social custom which celebrates the pregnant woman and satisfies her desires, primarily by offering her favorite food and giving her gifts. The event also serves an important social function since it brings together the families of the married couple, relatives, friends, and sometimes even community members like the headman of a village or a local leader.

32Among Hindus of different castes, the pregnant woman’s fertility is viewed as auspicious, directly correlating to the Hindu goddess Sakti. Although a family’s wealth determines the scale of the rituals and gifts (silk sarees, gold bangles, modern consumer goods), most families will perform the valaikapu out of social pressure, as a matter of prestige, or simply because it is a longstanding tradition (Van Hollen 2003:95). Across different communities, it is believed that the sound of glass bangles is beneficial to the development of the unborn child’s senses. The bangles are also meant to ward off evil, which is why a broken bangle is considered inauspicious.

33The valaikapu function is prevalent among Muslim families as well. During dissertation research (Kumar 2022), I learned from my female Muslim interlocutors that the valaikapu function among Muslims mainly involves glass bangles and sometimes turmeric and sandalwood paste that are applied on the pregnant woman’s forearms and cheeks to cool the body. However, garlands, kumkumam (a red powder applied to the forehead, primarily amongst Hindus) and Hindu rituals are avoided. Some Muslim families will also recite Islamic prayers during the function. Further, families that are financially well off will invite guests for a virunthu (a traditional meal eaten on a banana leaf) that involves five different kinds of rice dishes, much like what Van Hollen describes among her Hindu interlocutors. Some Muslim families no longer perform the valaikapu because it is viewed as too close to Hindu customs and therefore antithetical to reformist positions within the Islamic tradition. For the most part, however, Muslim families in Tamil Nadu continue to perform the valaikapu function in keeping with a tradition that has been passed down through the generations.

34A protest site may have seemed like an unusual venue to perform a valaikapu. Such functions usually take place at a pregnant woman’s natal home or at her husband’s home (and in some instances at function halls), but “home” had other potential meanings that day. To hold this function at Washermanpet was primarily an expression of dissent that was deeply tied to interreligious sociality and kinship. Muslim women stood on the dais with the Hindu couple and placed bangles on the hands of the pregnant woman. The pregnant woman wore a bright green saree, gold jewelry, henna on her hands, and a garland. While a Muslim man from the community raised the Urdu slogan Inquilab Zindabad (long live revolution), Muslim women off the dais threw uncooked rice grains—a symbol of prosperity—on the Hindu couple to bless them. The return gifts (thamboolam pai) were placed in cloth bags with the words “NO CAA NRC NPR” printed on them in bold red letters. The couple also said a few words, promising to bring their child to the protest site. In this series of moments, Washermanpet was materialized as a familial space that was inherently interreligious, thereby challenging the prevailing chauvinism of the Hindu Right. CSB not only became a site of social reproduction but challenged dominant understandings of kinship as simply biological (Sahlins 2013; Mody 2008; Carsten 2004).

  • 22 The 85 word preamble, a distillation of the Constitution of India, reads as follows: “WE, THE PEOPL (...)

35A week earlier, on February 17, 2020, a Muslim couple got married on the same dais, with the bride holding a poster of the Preamble of the Indian Constitution.22 A large India flag billowed in the wind behind her. According to news reports and video footage available on YouTube, they were married by an imam (a Muslim religious leader) with family members present as witnesses (The News Minute 2020). Protesters at CSB distributed sweets while another group of men and women surrounded the couple on the dais where they collectively raised slogans against the CAA/NRC/NPR. What is the significance of holding ostensibly apolitical functions in a protest space? How does the protest site become a place where such acts of kinship and familial bonds can be expressed?

Figure 7

Figure 7

A Muslim Bride holding the Preamble to the Indian Constitution at Chennai Shaheen Bagh

Photograph courtesy The News Minute

  • 23 Hindutva ideologue V. D. Savarkar put forth the notions of pitrabhumi, matrubhumi, and punyabhumi a (...)

36In one sense, the workings of kinship might be seen to exist “outside” the formally constituted political space. In another sense, the metaphorical idiom of the nation as a Hindu family united through blood, descent, and place-based notions of pitrabhumi (fatherland), matrubhumi (motherland), and punyabhumi (holy land), has become a persuasive one for many Indians.23 The performance of these rituals, then, is a reworking of the very metaphor that usually enforces exclusion.

37Recent scholarship has shown how religion, the family, and the institution of marriage are an integral part of the public and political domain and regulated by the state’s legal framework. Katherine Lemons (2019: 8), for example, demonstrates how Islamic marital dispute adjudication illuminates the workings and paradoxes of Indian secularism, wherein “kinship is central to secular governance.” Marriage, by virtue of being subject to public law (that extends to adjudications on property ownership, maintenance, and inheritance), is a public institution. Therefore, divorce is also very much a concern of the Indian state. Like marriage, religious practices trouble the neat boundaries between the public and the private. For example, rituals conducted at a roadside shrine necessarily spill over into the public life of a street (Kent 2018), and Tamil mourning rituals of lower caste communities have an explicit public function as the deceased is taken through public roads (Clark-Decès 2005). Celebrations that mark key moments in the life cycle of an individual (such as the manjal neeraatu vizha or coming-of-age ceremony for girls) are also public events, their size and scope determined by the wealth of the family.

38At Shaheen Bagh, we see a fusing of the inner and outer domains of Muslim women’s lives in a way that does not call into question their primordial separation. For the Muslim couple, choosing to marry at CSB, with their wedding witnessed by a large public, was a political and symbolic gesture. They were not the only couple to marry at an anti-CAA protest or bring practices of dissent into their wedding celebrations. A similar Muslim wedding took place in Coimbatore, another city in Tamil Nadu. In the neighboring state of Kerala, a groom arrived at his wedding on a camel holding an anti-CAA poster (Sengar 2020), and in Delhi, a student from Jamia Milia Islamia held up placards and posters denouncing the CAA at her wedding (Sarfaraz 2019).

  • 24 The government of India, for example, has actively intervened in the reproductive lives of its citi (...)

39A wedding or the birth of a child is often tied to hope, futurity, desire, and aspiration. At Washermanpet, they were also tied to the success of the protests and new possibilities of collective life. The bride holding the Preamble to the Constitution of India in her hand was an assertion of her fundamental rights as a citizen of India and as a Muslim. Indeed, norms around reproduction are closely tied to the governance of female sexuality.24 While reproduction is always already social, embedded in a field of judgments, morality, value, and norms, it can also take unexpected new forms and gesture to new meanings. The bangle ceremony and the wedding were forms of social reproduction that were meant to challenge the hegemonic, moral, and homogenizing imperative of Hindutva, even from within the heteronormative model of the family and sexuality. Receiving blessings for one’s unborn child or for a couple embarking on married life at this political juncture in India’s history are integral to the aspiration for a different imagination of the nation than the one imposed by the ruling regime. The phrase thoppil-kodi uravu (umbilical cord relations) is therefore an apt metaphor to describe not just Tamil sisterhood or brotherhood, but the solidarity between different Shaheen Baghs across the country. It also captures the camaraderie between people of different generations who partook in the protests, from the dadis (grannies) of Shaheen Bagh who were undeterred by the Delhi winter, to the Jamia Millia Islamia college students who put their safety on the line to protest a against a discriminatory regime.

Conclusion

40In this article, I have argued that Muslim women were crafting a new definition of community, political life, and inter-religious sociality at CSB through a practice of politics that involved female solidarity and kinship. Their demand for the equal treatment of minorities as mandated in the Indian Constitution indexes the larger malaise of Islamophobia in Indian society: Muslims have not only been politically and legally disenfranchised since the early days of the postcolonial state, but systematically othered, harassed, and lynched since the BJP came to power in 2014.

41If the broader rhetorical landscape oscillated between outright condemnation of the protests by the Hindu Right to a range of opinions about how Muslims should protest, the women of CSB show us another modality of dissent and belonging. They were making place for themselves amid violent disavowals of Muslims and Islam by drawing on intimate connections and longer-standing ties between communities. This is not to say that CSB was devoid of rhetorical flourishes that were directly aimed at the BJP. There were certainly explicit gestures and political speeches. Muslim women expressed their disenchantment with the state and its majoritarian policies that seek to disenfranchise them, while actively calling upon the state to uphold the constitutional values and safeguards assured to every citizen of the country. But in the process, they were unselfconsciously drawing together kinship, care, dissent, and solidarity.

42When protesters exclaim that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent. They are also alluding to the affective ties to place, community, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the demands of the state to prove one’s citizenship via documents. Although the protests were about a citizenship law, the protesters were in fact pointing to various modes of belonging that cannot be captured by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. Though short-lived, such protests show us a glimmer of possibility for a different, more egalitarian vision of collective life.

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Notes

1 According to a press release by the Indian government, “The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 aims to facilitate grant of citizenship to migrants belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who entered into India on or before the 31.12.2014 and who have been exempted by the Central Government by or under clause (c) of sub-section (2) of section 3 of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 or from the application of the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 or any rule or order made thereunder. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 has been notified on 12.12.2019 and has come into force w.e.f. 10.01.2020.”

2 For more on the NRC see Raj (2020).

3 For more on the NPR see Venkataramanan (2019).

4 On March 11, 2024, the rules of the CAA were finally released, four years after the Act was passed, and more than eight extensions later. For more on the rules see Hazarika (2023).

5 Scholars, journalists, and photographers have documented the impressive range of participants in these protests across religious, caste, and class divides, as well as the creative forms of dissent on display, from fiery speeches and street theater to music concerts (Lal 2023; Mufti 2023; Hashmi 2022; Singh 2022; Taneja 2022; Desai 2020; Nizaruddin 2020; Salam and Ausaf 2020).

6 Some examples include Muslim women’s involvement in the nationalist movement (Forbes 1996), protests by working-class Muslim women in Tamil Nadu’s Pudukottai district (Geetha 2018), and organizations such as the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Rasheed 2023; Dutta 2021).

7 My larger book project is an ethnography of Muslim belonging in contemporary India in a time of aggressive majoritarianism and religious nationalism. It seeks to push past statist discourses of citizenship toward a more expansive understanding of belonging that draws on longer histories and traditions that exceed both the totalizing logics of Hindu nationalism and prevailing antagonisms such as Hindu vs. Muslim or majority vs. minority. The spirit of this essay follows in that direction, but by articulating how citizenship claims themselves depend on an (often invisible) infrastructure of care, female sociality, and kinship.

8 See Geetha and Rajadurai (1998) for a comprehensive history of the non-Brahmin movement, and Karthick Ram Manoharan (2022) on the work and ideas of Periyar.

9 For a critique of the historical exceptionalism of the “geographical south” in opposition to north India, see Nair (2006).

10 I have omitted other important social justice and women’s movements for the sake of brevity. For example, see Kalpana K (2021) for more on the organization Pennurimai Iyyakam (focusing on the intersection of gender and labor) that emerged around the same time as STEPS.

11 Dakhni, a language that combines Urdu with various south Indian languages (as well as Marathi), has been described by scholars as the vernacular language of Deccani Muslims (Eaton 1978). See Fakhri (2008) for a history of “Tamil Dakhnis.” More ethnographic and historical research is needed to understand the intersections between Tamil-, Dakhni-, and Urdu-speaking Muslims in Tamil Nadu.

12 Madras (now Chennai) was established in 1639 by the English East India Company as a colonial trading post (see Hancock 2008 and Neild 1979 for a history of Madras/Chennai).

13 Cheris are settlements where Dalits have historically resided. They are spatially separated from the dwellings of caste Hindus (see Roberts 2016). Sociologist Hugo Gorringe describes cheris as “Dalit settlements on the outskirts of villages or Dalit housing estates and colonies in urban areas” (2016).

14 The Chennai Shaheen Bagh Facebook page can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/ChennaiShaheenbagh

15 It is important to note that protests emerged across the state of Tamil Nadu, even in small towns that had not seen such civil society gatherings, and where both men and women partook in marches and sit-ins.

16 At the time of this writing (September 2024), Sharjeel Imam is still in prison.

17 Flower garlands are a ubiquitous symbol in India, present on a wide range of occasions such as weddings, public celebrations, political rallies, religious rituals, and in Hindu funerals, where garlands are placed around the neck of the deceased. Within the context of the anti-CAA protests, this image was immediately legible to the crowd (including me) as one signaling death.

18 For differing perspectives on Tamil kinship, see Dumont 1953; Trautmann 1981; Trawick 1992; Clark-Decès 2014; and Nakassis 2014.

19 https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/shaheen-bagh-protest/

20 Wet nursing, for example, is a practice that has received scholarly attention for redefining familial relations between European employers and native Indian women during the colonial period (Hassan 2016; Sen 2009). However, the relation between different caste and religious communities through the practice of wet nursing is understudied.

21 See Hüsken (2013) for details about Brahmin rituals including valaikapu.

22 The 85 word preamble, a distillation of the Constitution of India, reads as follows: “WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens: JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation; IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.”

23 Hindutva ideologue V. D. Savarkar put forth the notions of pitrabhumi, matrubhumi, and punyabhumi as essential to Hindutva. Christians and Muslims were to be excluded from this conception of a Hindu nation. According to Savarkar, since their holy land is elsewhere, their supposed primary loyalties were incompatible Hindutva (Hansen 1999; Jalal 2001).

24 The government of India, for example, has actively intervened in the reproductive lives of its citizens through population control measures (including forced sterilization) since the 1950s. Biological reproduction therefore became a metonym for producing modern India (Sreenivas 2021).

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1
Caption Muslim Women Protest the CAA in Chennai: “We will not show our papers. We will not fear oppression” (translation of Tamil text)
Credits Photo by the author
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-1.png
File image/png, 174k
Title Figure 2
Caption Twenty-four days of Chennai Shaheen Bagh
Credits Photograph by Anusha Hariharan
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 61k
Title Figure 3
Caption Tamil posters at Chennai Shaheen Bagh
Credits Photograph by the author
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 142k
Title Figure 4
Caption Banner at Chennai Shaheen Bagh
Credits Photograph by the author
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-4.jpg
File image/jpeg, 96k
Title Figure 5
Caption Garland implying death to CAA NRC NPR
Credits Photograph by the author
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-5.jpg
File image/jpeg, 40k
Title Figure 6
Caption Bangle ceremony (valaikapu) of a Hindu woman at Washermanpet, Chennai
Credits Photograph courtesy The News Minute
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-6.jpg
File image/jpeg, 26k
Title Figure 7
Caption A Muslim Bride holding the Preamble to the Indian Constitution at Chennai Shaheen Bagh
Credits Photograph courtesy The News Minute
URL http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/docannexe/image/9727/img-7.jpg
File image/jpeg, 33k
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References

Electronic reference

Harini Kumar, “Nation at Repair, Women at Work”: Kinship, Dissent, and Citizenship in South IndiaSouth Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 32 | 2024, Online since 17 January 2025, connection on 16 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/9727; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/136ki

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About the author

Harini Kumar

Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale University

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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