- 1 The guest editors of this thematic issue, Nazima Parveen and Usha Sanyal, would like to thank the L (...)
1This thematic issue aims to document and analyze the ways in which Muslim women in India struggle to claim a place of their own in the face of exclusionary social mechanisms.1 Their predicament was aggravated by the coming to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ushered in a new political era commonly referred to as “Hindutva,” or Hindu majoritarianism. We explore both the multiplicity of the struggles of Muslim women and their role as agents of change, models of emulation and inspiration to their daughters and other women, and their efforts to realize not only their own personal dreams but also those of their families and their communities across several aspects of everyday life.
- 2 Maintenance refers to the financial support due to a divorced woman by her former husband. There ar (...)
2The articles in this collection touch upon some significant challenges facing Muslim women today. Starting with our basic, most general concern, the essays that comprise this special issue analyze the multilayered “Othering” of Muslim women in the popular political discourse, whether it be on account of their modes of dress, their religiosity, or other markers of Muslim cultural identity. As other scholars have documented, Muslim women often feel physically insecure in places where non-Muslims predominate (Kirmani 2013). At the same time, Muslim women in India are often deprived of many of their Quranically sanctioned rights by the community they belong to in matters related to inheritance, marriage, divorce, the custody of children, and the right to maintenance2 because of misogynistic readings of sharia law articulated by male religious scholars (the ulama). They are also deprived of their rights as Indian citizens, whether it comes to gender equality under the constitutionally protected family law or their citizenship status under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019), as discussed in some of our articles. Muslim women have responded to these challenges in a variety of ways, as the contributions illustrate.
3Second, we explore the spaces Muslim women occupy in the course of their personal lives and in the public sphere. It is noteworthy that “space” and “place” have increasingly come to be regarded as not merely having an influence on social organization, but as being socially produced in a variety of ways. This “spatial turn” in critical theory has helped scholars to appreciate the importance of, and focus on the meanings of, exclusions, accessibility, and assertions of identity in public and private spaces and has encouraged a scholarly reinterpretation of social dynamics—as manifested in antagonisms, interactions, conflicts, collaborations, and negotiations between different social groups (Certoma, Clewer, and Elsey 2012). In this volume, we think conceptually about “space” and “place” to understand the ways in which Muslim women negotiate and navigate patriarchal structures of power and control—the exclusionary mechanisms they face. We also build on Kalyani Menon’s (2022) concept of Muslim women “making place,” that is, of claiming public space as their own despite multiple social and economic hurdles.
4In India, women’s spaces in general, and Muslim women’s spaces in particular, are often seen as being coterminous with “private” or family-centered spaces rather than “public” ones such as the marketplace (Devji 1991). Public space—the space of institutional religion, production, politics, and power—is perceived by Indian society at large as the sphere of men, whereas private space—the sphere of reproduction—is thought of as women’s space. This cultural expectation has been amplified for Muslim women since the early 2000s not only because of pardah (gender-related seclusion) rules but because Indian Muslims’ access to public space has been shrinking steadily. These cultural notions translate the Indian patriarchal social structure and ideas about the nature of work and women’s gender roles into spatial terms. Thus, gender stratification is sustained through the delimitation of women’s access to certain kinds of physical space (Devji 1991; Menon 2022; Massey 1994).
5However, we enlarge this conceptual canvas by reflecting on how Muslim women “make place.” Menon (2022:35) notes that “[p]laces are made.” That is to say, daily practice—consisting of simple acts such as praying, wearing a burqa when out in public, cooking and baking, as well as storytelling—is key: “everyday practices of Muslim life, variegated narratives of identity and belonging, and articulations of forgotten histories … can all be seen as practices through which Muslims make place for themselves in contemporary India” (Menon 2022:45). We examine women in the context not only of care work in the family but also as economic providers whose skilled labor earns an income, no matter how meager, and thereby helps sustain their families, as neighbors helping one another, as teachers and students whose education allows them to aspire to greater opportunities than were available to their mothers, as protesters in public streets and thoroughfares speaking out against government laws seen as discriminatory and contrary to the Indian constitution, and as litigators and social activists seeking institutional legal reform of Muslim Personal Law. In short, the essays in this special issue portray the many ways in which Indian Muslim women are active Indian citizens claiming their place in both private and public spaces.
6Third, we examine the exclusionary mechanisms, heightened by the Hindu majoritarian policies of the BJP government after it assumed power in 2014, under which Indian Muslim women live and work, to understand the social production of spaces. Certoma et al. argue in Politics of Space and Place (2012:1) that “the spaces through which we move and the places in which we live are thoroughly political, if not always explicitly politicized. Politics shapes the very homes, streets and cities in which we live, defining the spaces and places in which we are able to pursue our lives.” This conceptualization helps us to understand the complex configuration of Muslim women’s identity, politics, and space, especially in the contemporary moment of aggressive Hindutva politics. Thus, it is important to ask: What are these mechanisms and how have they been heightened under Hindutva? How does the Hindutva context change the circumstances of their lives?
7Many scholars have written about Islamophobia in India under the BJP (Mohammad-Arif, Naudet, and Jaoul 2020; Jaffrelot 2021). Scholars point to a series of government actions widely seen as targeting Muslims in acts mandated by the central government: for example, the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir in August 2019, or the Supreme Court’s handing over the grounds of the destroyed Babri Masjid to the Hindu side of the dispute that same year, or the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019, which gave non-Muslim religious minorities from neighboring countries the right to apply for Indian citizenship while it denied this right to Muslim minorities, be it the persecuted Shia, the Ahmadis, or the Bohra communities.
8But more ominously, perhaps, the evidence includes everyday acts of verbal and physical violence against Muslim citizens. Verbal violence has occurred when they were blamed for the spread of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and again when NCERT textbooks were rewritten in 2023–24 to excise whole sections about Mughal rule, among other things (Rahman 2024). Physical violence included the lynching of Muslim men transporting cattle to abattoirs legally approved by local governments, with the support of the police, or attacking Muslims praying in public spaces in Nuh, Haryana, in 2023, for example.
9Based on careful and extensive fieldwork, the essays in this thematic issue examine the lives and struggles of Muslim women in different parts of India to address issues such as love jihad, triple talaq, online bullying and harassment of women on popular platforms such as WhatsApp, educational exclusion, the participation of women in anti-CAA protests in Tamil Nadu, and Muslim women’s everyday experiences of being the “Other” in early twenty-first century India more generally.
- 3 Thus, they write: “the term ‘identity’ is made to do a great deal of work. It is used to highlight (...)
- 4 We use the term in its “weak” sense, as defined by Brubaker and Cooper.
10These essays engage with the notions of “identity” and “agency,” which require critical theoretical attention. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) have argued that the term identity is overburdened and has become analytically unhelpful, as it can mean different things to different people.3 Instead, they suggest using the term “identification,” which “invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying” and does not presume that it leads to sameness or bounded groupings (Brubaker and Cooper 2000:14). In addition, they suggest that we think in terms of self-understanding, to distinguish between how a person sees herself versus how the state categorizes her, for example. They also put forward other terms—commonality, connectedness, and groupness—to further disaggregate the many possible meanings of the term identity. Recognizing the problems intrinsic to the conceptualization of identity, we realize that identities are created in historical context and change over time, and that they are relational, “formed through social interactions” with members of the wider community (Mahmood 2005:13).4 Similarly, the meanings of women’s agency are not limited to voice and visibility and are expressed in a variety of ways.
11Mahmood’s influential ethnographic work on women in Egypt’s Islamic piety movements has encouraged critical debates on the agency of Muslim women and the discursive construction of Muslim women’s identity. Mahmood separates agency from resistance to explain the ways in which Muslim women navigate and negotiate masculine spaces. She argues that assumptions embedded within feminist theory and secular liberal politics are insufficient to explain women’s participation or to register women’s agency performed outside the “usual forms and institutions of politics” such as the state, the judicial system, and the sites of public protest (Mahmood 2005:152). Women, according to her, can cultivate social constraints for emancipatory ends.
12Mahmood’s conception of agency is context-specific and representative of the post-9/11 debates about Western versus Islamic conceptions of women’s rights in the Middle East. According to Mahmood’s formulation, instead of becoming autonomous subjects of rights, women try to become pious Muslims. However, this analysis does not always apply in the South Asian context. According to Afia Zia and Ayesha Khan, Mahmood presents the concept of a “docile Muslim female agent” who opposes the Western secular rights framework and prefers to operate within given Islamic/religious norms (Zia 2018; Khan 2018). Zia (2018:38) argues that academic writings influenced by Mahmood in Pakistan present this agent as “an alternative discourse to liberal feminist aspirations in general.” While we need to be critical of the “secular/feminist/godless/westernized” or “authentic/Islamic/traditional” binary, the question of Muslim women’s agency must also be situated in different national contexts to chart the specific forms their struggles take and the ways they operate (Kirmani 2013:152). Zia, Khan, and Kirmani have argued that not all Muslim women fit into Mahmood’s conception: some use a human rights framework and assert their agency against the state-centric, creeping Islamization of their nation as well as the imposition of a misogynist sharia law that affects their rights. This is also true of Muslim women activists in Muslim-minority India who, despite their differences of opinion, have been problematizing the imposition of patriarchal social norms in the name of Islam, and/or campaigning against the state-protected Muslim Personal Law (MPL). Thus, the notion of Muslim women’s agency should accommodate the variety of ways in which Muslim women interpret, accept, negotiate, reject, adopt, and/or create a framework(s) of rights in postcolonial India and Pakistan, where religious identity is discursively constituted. Mahmood’s conception can help explain the unexplored forms of agency, which in many cases are employed by or available to women in general, but it cannot be treated as a definitive model to chart all expressions of agency by Indian Muslim women.
13Abu-Lughod’s celebrated work, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? tackles identity and agency in the context of the wider discourse of global and national politics. Abu-Lughod offers a theoretical framework to counter the prejudices, misconceptions, and negative images of Muslim women. Her work paves the way for us to recognize, discuss, and debate Muslim women’s everyday lives and voices in all their richness and complexity (Abu-Lughod 2013). Most importantly, she urges us to decode the global as well as nationalist constructions of identity while simultaneously redefining the meanings of agency. Together with other scholars, her work shows that identity and agency are socially constructed—rather than reflective solely of individual will and resistance to authority—and historically contingent and subject to change over time.
14Moreover, in contemporary India, how a Muslim woman sees herself is often very different from the way dominant outside groups view her and label her. Taking an emic view of identity, we couch our analysis of both identity and agency in terms of the self-understandings of our subjects as reflected in both their practice and discourse.
15There is an emerging body of literature that challenges the conventional understanding, imagination, and portrayal of “the Muslim woman,” including the stereotypes and assumptions often invoked in public discourses, the media, and academic debates (Jeffery and Qureshi 2022). We contribute to this body of work by discussing the silences, assertions, and claims of Muslim women, a diverse group of individuals in India’s deeply communalized sociopolitical context. We map out their everyday struggles and challenges for survival, and their individual and collective voices as they negotiate their place, identity, and rights as women who are both Muslim and Indian, vis-à-vis the immediate community to which they belong and at greater remove, vis-à-vis a political regime which has normalized Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments in everyday discourse. The essays in this issue highlight the complex and multiple trajectories of Muslim women’s lives as they intersect with the structural inequalities created by caste, class, gender, and religion, together with inequalities in education, employment, and political participation.
- 5 In this issue, we use the term “imaginary” as a noun rather than an adjective to refer to a worldvi (...)
- 6 Focusing on contemporary France, Italy, and the Netherlands, Farris shows that by characterizing Mu (...)
16While tenacious stereotypes of “the Indian Muslim woman” continue to pervade dominant discourses, both silently and in aggressively vocal ways, we endeavor to disaggregate the concept itself. The construction of the “Muslim woman” as an object of analysis and as an imaginary has a global as well as an Indian story.5 The dominant image of the Muslim woman who needs to be rescued from barbaric Muslim men has been propagated globally since 9/11, especially in the West but elsewhere as well (Abu-Lughod 2002). In these narratives, the “Muslim woman,” as a constructed category, has been used symbolically as a pawn in the West’s war against Islamic terrorism. It has been used as a tool to legitimize extreme violence and neocolonial economic and political expansion in Central Asia (Hirchkind and Mahmood 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002; Cooke 2008). This was evident in the multiple contrasting images of Afghan and Iraqi women in Western media which were globally propagated to define war as a way to establish peace, democracy, and liberation in Muslim-dominated Central Asia. Similarly, these images have been used by right-wing nationalist regimes in Western societies in their anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant campaigns, which exploit migrant Muslim women and limit them to the domestic and caregiving industries. Sara R. Farris (2017:10) calls this the rise of “femonationalism, which means the co-option and exploitation of women’s rights for the promotion of a right-wing political agenda.”6
17In India, the idea of “the Muslim woman” has had a complicated historical trajectory from the colonial era to the present. It became salient in the Indian media and in political discourse in the late 1980s in the aftermath of the Shah Bano controversy and the Ram Janmabhumi-Babri Masjid dispute that led to the rise of Hindu right-wing religious and political groups. Thus, the subject herself has often been represented as the victim of history. As Sarkar (2008) shows, the production of the term “the Indian Muslim woman” requires us to question the normative ideals as well as binaries that go back to the discourses of anticolonial nationalism and the liberal feminist movement in India.
18Lata Mani’s work on sati (widow burning) in the colonial period shows us that the perception that Indian women need to be rescued from Indian men goes back to the “civilizing mission” of British colonialism, ardently supported by Christian missionaries (Mani 1998:155). The colonial authorities argued that through education, religious reform, and legislative intervention the British could—and should—rescue Hindu women from “the accumulated miseries to which they are subject” (Mani 1998:129). Fast forwarding to the contemporary era, we see that this mission has been multifariously revitalized over the years—with the “Hindu” being replaced by the “Muslim” in independent India—alongside the changing nature of the state and meanings of nation(s), nationalism(s), and national identity. The “nation-building” and “national integration” programs of the Congress regime ignored women’s rights beyond the family and domestic space. At the same time they invisibilized Muslim women’s identity and rights in the name of protecting the Muslim minority’s right to religious freedom. Later, Hindutva organizations carried forward the imaginary of Muslim women as a subjugated social group in order to demonize Islam, Muslim culture, and Muslim identity. Hence, according to the Hindutva brigade’s civilizing mission, Indian “Muslim sisters now need to be liberated from barbaric and inhuman Muslim men” in India’s changed political context (Gupta, Gökarıksel, and Smith 2020).
19Significantly, the concept of the Muslim woman has been and is still being produced in conjunction with multiple images of veiled women, signifying their status as “backward,” passive, mute, confined, oppressed, and victimized by Islamic principles and by Muslim men. These images define them as “Muslim” and as “women,” as two constituent elements entangled in a problematic relationship of salvation as well as liberation which cannot be realized until the two are separated. This very conception has produced various contradictory, yet parallel, imaginaries in which the Muslim woman figures as the victim of Muslim men, as a carrier of Islam and Islamic culture, and as a voiceless person (Hasan and Menon 2004).
20Hindutva organizations, including the BJP and RSS, have also been using this image to establish their political hegemony as representatives of a self-proclaimed progressive and inclusive “Hindu nation.” This construction and propagation of Muslim women and the vilification of Muslim men through print and visual media have worked well for Hindutva politics. It has allowed Hindutva groups to establish the Muslim community at large as the backward and non-inclusive Other (Cohn 1987; Appadurai 1993; Basu 1996; Jeffery and Jeffery 2002; Basu 2004; Gupta 2009; Basu 2015; Mander et al. 2016; Gupta 2018; Desai and Amarasingam 2020; Gupta 2021; Mander 2021; Quraishi 2021). These tropes were utilized during the instant triple talaq debate, in which Muslim women’s rights discourse was manipulated to establish Hindutva’s political, cultural, and masculine supremacy, as we discuss below.
- 7 The mediatized Hindutva discourse has coined various terms to define different kinds of jihad to co (...)
21However, the post-2019 BJP government has modified this image following the anti-CAA/NRC (National Register of Citizens) protests, the Shaheen Bagh movement in 2019, and the controversy over a hijab ban in educational institutions in the state of Karnataka. Hindutva discourse no longer sees Muslim women as mere victims of Muslim personal laws and Muslim men; rather, it now perceives them as the progenitors of all kinds of jihad and as equal perpetuators of Islamic radicalization as men (for different kinds of jihad, see Phadke 2022; Apoorvanand 2022; Joseph 2022; Dhumal 2023; Siddiqui 2024; Scroll Staff 2024; Kaiser, this issue).7 In this revised scheme of Hindutva politics, the burqa and hijab are not considered symbols of subjugation (on pardah, see, e.g., Ahmad 1976; Lal 2013) but a reminder that Indian Muslim women harbor an equally antinational and non-inclusive attitude as Indian Muslim men. Thus, the portrayal of over-fertile Muslim women goes hand in hand with that of oversexed, predatory Muslim men who actualize the mission of “ham panch, hamare pachis” (We [are] five and [we have] twenty-five [children]), in order to numerically subjugate the Hindu population, weaken the Indian economy, and claim the country’s (read, Hindu) resources. While digital spaces reduced the image of hijabi, passive, oppressed Muslim women to “porn material” to be consumed by the Hindu male gaze, they put outspoken, professional, and protesting Muslim women up for sale through different Apps (Basu, this issue).
22However, Hindutva organizations in the terrain of electoral politics are not alone in aspiring to “rescue” Muslim women from Muslim men. The mainstream Hindu upper-caste-dominated urban Indian feminist movement and the so-called nationalist imagination also assume that Muslim women lack agency. In their pro-Muslim women imaginations and struggles, the liberation of Muslim women can only occur if they are separated from Muslim men and Islam, as the latter represent an antithesis to progress and liberation (for detailed discussions, see Hasan and Menon 2004; Kirmani 2009, 2011, 2013; Jamil 2018). Indian feminist critics argue that educated Hindu middle-class, upper-caste urban women feminists have failed to address issues specific to women in marginalized communities like Dalits, Muslims, and Adivasis, within or without its so called “secular” framework, as well as notions of progress and change (Kirmani 2008; Sabharwal and Sonalkar 2015). According to Jameel, Muslim women, like Dalit and Adivasi women, do not conform to the given tropes of “Indian sisterhood” proposed by feminists (Jamil 2018). In this sense, mainstream feminists, in their struggle for women’s rights using established notions of rights, agency, and identity, have not only undermined Muslim women’s voices for change but have also downplayed the gendered communal discrimination and violence that affect their everyday lives, shaping and limiting their spaces, aspirations, and movements alongside those of Muslim men (Kirmani 2009).
23This invisibilization of marginalized voices encouraged the rise of various autonomous and independent Dalit, tribal, and Muslim women-led movements in the early 1980s and 1990s (Sabharwal and Sonalkar 2015). The Indian Muslim-led “feminist” movement appreciates and cooperates with the collective struggle for gender equality while at the same time speaking out against the dominant construction of Muslim women’s identity (Hasan and Menon 2004; Kirmani 2009; Vatuk 2013; Jones, 2010, 2020; Hasan 2017; Parveen, Sanyal, and Soman, this issue).
24While these dominant conceptions reduce Muslim women’s identity to that of mere objects, they are also subjected to the structures of gender inequality within Muslim communities and to the discursive construction of a post-independence Indian Muslim political identity (Parveen 2022). The Muslim clergy (more correctly, the ulama, or Islamic scholars), the so-called community representatives, the political class, and the specific sociocultural norms at large pose different challenges to Muslim women, overburdening them with the responsibility of being “saviors” of both Islamic culture and Muslim political identity. Barbara Metcalf, scholar of Islamic reform movements in colonial India, argues that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Islamic reformers established an imaginary of the ideal Muslim woman as a pious and modest protector of a Muslim ethnonational identity (Metcalf 1990). This construction of the ideal woman’s identity, which evolved in response to colonial interventions, continues into the present (Metcalf 1990; for more discussion, see Minault 1986; Devji 1991; Chakrabarty 1993; Chatterjee 1993; Sanyal 2020; Alam 2021).
25In fact, this image was refashioned to establish Muslim women as the carriers of post-independence/post-Partition cultural, spatial, and political insecurities (Parveen 2021). In this schema, on the one hand veiled and hijabi Muslim women are glamorized as Islam ki pariyan (angels of Islam) to assert a distinctive cultural/religious identity within the framework of national integration or against the Hindutva groups’ assertion of cultural homogenization. The 2022 controversy about female Muslim students in Karnataka wearing the hijab on campus reflects this objectification of Muslim women wherein Muslim girls were praised for prioritizing their Islamic identity over their desire for an education. On the other hand, on the issue of legislative intervention in Muslim Personal Law, which has been projected as the most significant symbol of Muslim political identity in India by the proponents of so-called secular, Hindutva, and minority identity politics, Muslim women are expected to surrender their Islamic and/or constitutional rights (Parveen 2022). Indian Muslim women are thus, like their fellow female citizens, required to be the bearers of an ethnonational cultural identity (Chakrabarty 1993; Chatterjee 1993; Sarkar 1998; Gupta 2002) while also being the preservers of “their” post-Partition Indian Muslim political identity (Parveen 2022). These expectations have been aggravated since the onset of BJP rule in 2014. Recent debates on the reform of Muslim Personal Law reflect the complexities of the positionality of Muslims in general and of Muslim women in particular, as members of a religious minority (Parveen, this issue).
26The foregoing discussion encourages us to look at the construction of Muslim women’s agency historically in different national contexts, in order to analyze the contemporary narratives of their socioeconomic marginalization and assertion in India with special reference to intersectionality (Deeb 2006; Khoja-Moolji 2018), positionality (Hasan and Menon 2004), and precarity (Ahmad 2017).
27Taking Saba Mahmood’s conceptualization of “agency" as an entry point, a rich body of scholarly work has highlighted the complex construction of the concept of the “Indian Muslim woman” itself in the context of the actual everyday lives and struggles of Muslim women (Jeffery and Qureshi 2022). This scholarship discusses the ways in which the established definition of agency has not only invisibilized Muslim women from the dominant discourse(s) of nation and national identity but has also set the terms of these discourses by defining “agency” in ways that could only be understood in terms of “actions” and “resistance.” The first category of feminist scholars has explored the historical construction of Muslim women’s identity to make sense of invisibilization from academic discourse and everyday experiences. It looks at the production of a contradictory yet interrelated identity of an ideal Muslim and Hindu woman in response to the colonial civilizational mission and later to the Hindu right (Metcalf 1990; Appadurai 1993; Chatterjee 1999; Sarkar 2008). Mahua Sarkar explains that the intersection of the two discourses of modernity—nationalism and liberal feminism—inevitably produced the Muslim woman as the invisible, oppressed, and backward Other of the normative modern subject in late colonial Bengal. She argues that the anticolonial nationalist movement actively countered colonial civilizational attempts, especially those that focused on the upliftment of women, with its own constructions. The nationalist project constructed an ethnic and national modern Indian identity, which was actually an attempt to control women’s bodies and their sexuality. It produced an ideal notion of the educated modern Indian woman who was essentially Hindu. For liberal feminism, Sarkar argues, the image of the backward Muslim woman served to maintain the dominance of socially and politically privileged women as symbols of the modern nation and also to establish the liberal feminist definition of agency or consciousness as the normative one (Sarkar 2008). The definition of agency in liberal feminist discourse is, thus, limited to visibility and voice. Sarkar argues that the construction of a negative identity of Muslim women, in this sense, is the result of civilizational projects of the global North and the Hindu right on the one hand, and limited understandings of agency by liberal feminists on the other.
28These distinctions became clear during the Shah Bano case and the political rise of the Hindu right in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The absence of Muslim women’s voices in the Shah Bano debates, as well as the critiques of the mainstream women’s movement by Dalit women’s groups during the 1990s (Dietrich 2003) highlighted the lack of representation and leadership of women from marginalized groups within the urban-based mainstream women’s movement dominated by upper-caste Hindu women, as discussed above (Subramaniam 2006:50). These challenges provided the space for autonomous voices to organize under the umbrella of the women’s movement. Nida Kirmani has also discussed the formation of various Muslim women-led organizations in the 1980s and 1990s and the ways in which they were reconstructing the concept of “Muslim women” on their own, often in “competing and sometimes contradictory terms” (Kirmani 2009; Vatuk 2013). Today these women’s organizations are redefining their relationship with the Indian state as well as the community they belong to by evoking their constitutional right to gender equality and by challenging the established patriarchal interpretations of the Quran and hadith.
29This reconstruction is very visible in Muslim women’s individual and collective voices that challenge given definitions of community identity, citizenship rights, nation, and nationalism(s) (Tschalaer 2017; Lemons 2019b; Saxena 2022). These works look at the discursive relationship of Muslim women to religious practices in the context of their struggle for rights granted by the Quran in matters of divorce, marriage, and inheritance. Saumya Saxena’s Divorce and Democracy: A History of Personal Law in Post-Independence India (2022) discusses the configurations of individual and community identity and the debates on family laws, which are mired in the secular-communal binary. She charts the collective voices of Muslim women that challenge the patriarchal interpretations of Muslim Personal Law (2022). Katherine Lemons’s Divorcing Traditions (2019a) and Mengia Hong Tschalaer’s Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice (2017) discuss the individual and collective voices of Muslim women who are not only creating a rights discourse from below but are also redefining the meanings of “secularism” and democracy. Both these works highlight the ways in which women navigate, negotiate, and create place in multiple formal and informal forums and institutions like dar-ul-qaza centers, the police, and the judiciary.
30These academic interventions offer a theoretical framework for us to understand the everyday struggles of Muslim women in contemporary India. Recognizing the crucial debate on the “recovery” of Muslim women’s agency (Madhok, Phillips, and Wilson 2013; Jamil 2018; Sarkar 2017), this special issue registers the individual and collective voices and actions of Muslim women who are reconstructing the very category of “Indian Muslim women” (Kirmani 2009:2).
- 8 Vatuk writes in the same sentence that this image of an “excessively Westernized woman” includes th (...)
31However, because this special issue discusses Muslim women’s lives at a time when the BJP regime has posited “Hindu” and “Muslim” identities as distinct and conflicting categories in binary opposition to each other, we recognize that we risk producing a competing and highly essentialized image of Muslim women. As Kirmani cautions, such an academic intervention may “reinforce the idea that Muslim women’s lives are governed solely … by the injunctions of Islam” (2013:8). For this reason, we argue emphatically that religion and gender should not be regarded as the essential or only features of identity. Rather, the lives of Muslim women are shaped as well by their positionality, intersectionality, and precarity in complex ways (Jeffery and Qureshi 2022). It is in this context that we deliberately eschew the label “feminist” to describe our subjects, keeping in mind the fact that for many Indian Muslim women activists “the term has … negative connotations … [and] calls up images of an excessively Westernized woman” (Vatuk 2013:372). Thus, most women activists in India, across communities, avoid being identified as feminists.8
32As noted earlier, thinking conceptually about “space” and “place,” we want to build on Kalyani Menon’s notion of Muslim women “making place,” that is, of claiming public space as their own, whether through rituals and festivals, or simply by living side by side with fellow Muslims—and non-Muslims as well (Menon 2022).
33However, this cannot be understood without discussing the issue of precarity, which is the other side of the coin of agency (Ahmad 2017) that defines Muslim women’s movements, negotiations, and navigations. Precarity encourages us to look at the complex configuration of identity, space, and politics. Indian Muslim precarity is deeply connected with the production of communal geographies—that is, the historically and socially evolved demarcation of residential neighborhoods or urban spaces along the lines of religious identity (Parveen 2021, 2024). This demarcation has reduced the complex gender, caste, and class struggles to the stereotyping of Muslim communities as a homogeneous, backward, and separatist group.
34In post-independence India, the politics of space was linked to Partition violence, which discursively constituted the Indian Muslim identity. The dominant narratives of politics and the debates on the secularization versus the Hinduization of Muslims in order to achieve “national integration” gave rise to cultural, political, and physical insecurities in Muslim communities while at the same time establishing Muslim identity and space as contested categories. The issues of precarity and the invisibilization of Muslim women’s struggles in political and academic debates thus need to be placed in the context of anti-Muslim rhetoric, dispossession, and discrimination, which became prominent during and after the National Emergency in the late 1970s (Parveen 2021).
35The work of Nida Kirmani, Kalyani Devaki Menon, and Usha Sanyal offers a framework for understanding the manifold kinds of marginalization faced by Muslim women: the intersection of religious practices, religious identity, class, and caste, and the ways in which they navigate and negotiate a space for themselves within and without “Muslim localities” and Muslim/minority institutions (Kirmani 2013; Menon 2022; Sanyal 2020). Kirmani (2013) discusses Muslim women’s lives in India in the context of their socioreligious identity and experiences of marginalization, and highlights the insecurity they face every day in a predominantly Muslim locality in South Delhi. Menon (2022) examines the position of Muslim women as members of a religious minority living in a low-income locality in Old Delhi. She explains the socioeconomic and political forces that shape the worlds of a number of Muslim women and how they negotiate landscapes of inequality, especially in a neoliberal economy and right-wing Hindutva politics. Usha Sanyal (2020) explores this question in the context of girls’ madrasas, which have been yet another constitutive element of contestation of identity and agency, and at the same time the site of distinct experiences. Looking at the rapid growth of educational institutions of Islamic learning for women and girls, especially in India and South Asia, Sanyal argues that Muslim women and girls belonging to some marginalized Muslim communities view these paradoxically “modern” religious institutions as a safe space in which to study and develop greater self-awareness and self-confidence. The students’ new-found imaginary is grounded in their communities of origin but also leads them to aspire to wider educational, social, and/or professional possibilities. Thus, they begin to re-imagine their place in traditional structures of patriarchal authority in the public and private spheres in light of their madrasa experience (see also Deeb 2006; Borker 2018).
36These discussions illustrate how Muslim women in post-independence India are discursively constructing new identities and the ways in which they navigate exclusionary spaces to make place for themselves. As stated above, we aim in this issue to make a significant contribution to thinking closely and in new ways about Muslim spaces and how Muslim women “make place.” As noted earlier, Muslim women’s spaces are often seen as being coterminous with “private” or family-centered spaces rather than “public” ones (Devji 1991). However, our essays offer a number of ways of enlarging this conceptual canvas. Whether in education (secular or religious), or Muslim women’s role in the informal economy, which is vital to maintaining a family’s income, or women’s roles in public protests such as the anti-CAA protests in Delhi and elsewhere, and the ways in which they negotiate their rights in the formal and informal legal-institutional spaces, we see Muslim women playing much more important roles in contemporary India than this public-private binary allows.
37Additionally, we argue that women make place in spaces that are “liminal” in the sense that they partake of both the private and public. Women’s occupation of religious spaces such as dargahs (a Sufi religious site) is liminal as it is a place of popular devotion and a place of safety and healing, where women pray for the welfare of their families (see Bellamy 2011; Farah 2016). It is also often associated with cooking for and feeding pilgrims, and thus of providing for their welfare. By feeding the community at large, not just their own families, Muslim women provide for the community in this very concrete sense as well (Werbner 2003:121–26).
38As Harini Kumar shows, women created interreligious shared spaces in neighborhood streets in different cities during the anti-CAA protests of 2019–20, in part by cooking for and feeding protesters, whether neighbors or unknown outsiders. Sanyal’s article shows that girls’ madrasas are also such a sphere that partakes of liminality and psychological nurturance and safety for its students by combining aspects of daily domestic life and norms of adab (etiquette) between students on the one hand and the authority exercised by the administration and faculty on the other.
39The BJP’s politics of Indian Muslim women since 2014 have made “saving” Muslim women from Muslim men so as to help them “develop” and advance a key part of its electoral rhetoric in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and elsewhere, while actually doing everything it possibly could to disempower them. The example of the Karnataka hijab-wearing students is pertinent here, as many students have had to drop out of college or have suffered by having to enroll in different programs and colleges, some as online students, as a result of the “hijab ban” in 2022 (Rahman 2024). Thus, while claiming to “liberate” Muslim women from the hijab, BJP politics is undermining their hopes for productive employment in the public sphere.
40With the idea of “making place” as the issue’s major theme, this collection of essays is organized along spatial lines: women in domestic spaces, followed by girls in educational spaces, and then by women in a variety of public arenas: the law, the anti-CAA protests of 2019–20, and online spaces. Kalyani Menon’s article, “Religion, Power, and Place: Three Women’s Stories from Old Delhi,” discusses the ways in which Muslim women, affected by intersecting axes of religious, class, and gender identities make place for themselves in contemporary India amid the revanchist politics of the Hindu Right. Menon draws on her ethnographic fieldwork with diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi to show how religion can create space—and make place—for Muslim women to re-imagine and re-inscribe their lives and worlds on their own terms.
- 9 Gharelu women are married women with household responsibilities who do not have a paid job outside (...)
41Shahana Munazir’s article, “‘Khidmat as Understanding’: Muslim Women, Marriage, and the Ethics of Care,” contributes to this thesis by examining the ordinary ethics of care of gharelu Muslim women in working-class neighborhoods of Patna, Bihar.9 The ethnographic evidence she presents complicates prevailing simplistic perceptions of contemporary Islamic womanhood to explore the shifting dynamics and meanings of care within localized contexts in India.
42Usha Sanyal, in “Madrasa Imaginaries and the Politics of UP Government Reform Seen in the Light of Two Case Studies,” explores how Muslim girls make place for themselves despite the challenges posed by the Yogi Adityanath government to madrasa education in UP, especially in the context of the madrasa survey of 2022–23. The article critically examines the discourse(s) on reform from the colonial era to the present to explain the historical roots of the current distrust of madrasa education on the part of secular Indians and the Hindutva-leaning public. Sanyal shows that madrasas play a valuable role in educating Muslim girls, inculcating a habitus of piety and quiet self-discipline, and teaching life skills which benefit lower-middle-class families.
43The next three articles examine how Muslim women make place for themselves in relation to the law. Nidah Kaiser’s chapter, “‘Becoming’ a Muslim Woman and the Myth of ‘Love Jihad,’” investigates the meanings of adhering to a Muslim women’s identity under the current Hindutva regime. She examines the complex trajectories of converted “new Muslim women” from being mere victims of love jihad to being treated as a threat to national security in the wake of the UP government’s legal enactments on religious conversion. Using the concept of securitization, Kaiser explains how patriarchal structures of control function when they are outsourced from the family to the state (police and judiciary) in the sociopolitical space created by the BJP government.
44Nazima Parveen’s article, “Criminalization of Divorce and Muslim Women in India: A Reality Check of the Triple Talaq Law, 2019,” examines the nature, contestations, and meanings of “reform” in Muslim Personal Law, and the issue of gender justice in the context of the larger political discourse (secular versus communal) and political symbolism (Muslim Personal Law (MPL) versus Uniform Civil Code (UCC). The paper shows how the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act (MWA), 2019 has destabilized the notion of the Muslim family in multiple ways. It also shows how Muslim women navigate formal institutions—legal spaces—to assert their Quranic as well as their constitutional rights beyond the existing UCC versus MPL debate.
45Zakia Soman, a grassroots activist and a founding member of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), sheds more light on the debate and the ways in which the BMMA has looked at the question of “Uniform Civil Code and Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice.” In conversation with Nazima Parveen, Soman discusses the dynamic women’s movement in India, the Muslim women-led movement for rights and dignity in personal matters, and the diversity of opinions within this movement on the issue of reform of MPL, and its implications under different political regimes. Soman explains why the true secular spirit of the UCC needs to be reclaimed for the sake of gender-justice. The conversation brings an activist’s perspective on gender rights into the academic discourse. The conversation spells out the interesting ways in which the BMMA’s contribution is creating a “third space” in which Muslim women redefine their identities and reformulate relations of power differently under different political regimes.
46Next, we look at Muslim women “making place” by protesting in public spaces. Harini Kumar, in her article “‘Nation at Repair, Women at Work’: Kinship, Dissent, and Citizenship in South India,” points out that amid countrywide protests from December 2019 to March 2020 against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), there emerged a unique political moment spearheaded by Muslim women. Focusing 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, Kumar argues that seemingly apolitical aspects of religious and social life—prayer, marriage, and rituals—are also expressions of political and moral will.
47Soma Basu’s article, “Porn, Protests and Politics: Hindu Male Imaginations of Muslim Women,” discusses a shift in the narratives about Muslim women from individuals who need “to be saved by Hindu men” to “objects that must be possessed” for power and finally, to “absolute disposables” in digital space. She analyzes the Hindus’ spectrum of perceptions about Indian Muslim women in online narratives during the anti-CAA protests and Delhi riots of 2019–20 to demonstrate the dominant Hindu imaginaries about Muslim women, which contributes to the Hindutva notion of Indian nationhood.
48Our goal is to understand Indian women’s everyday lives and struggles in the BJP-led era of Hindu majoritarianism, through careful ethnographic fieldwork in specific places, among specific groups of women. The contributors’ rich ethnographic studies demonstrate the complex lived realities of Indian Muslim women through an exploration of the interconnections and intersections of the factors of class, caste, region, and language. The women are further differentiated by education, employment, marital status, and political participation, all of which shape their struggles as well as their forms of agency. Hindutva ideology translating into a rightist political regime has produced new imaginaries of the category called “Muslim women”—from being mere victims of Islam and barbaric Muslim men to being nurturers of jihadi mentality, anti-national, and symbols of non-inclusivity. However, we argue that this objectification reflects the ways in which Muslim women have survived disparities and responded to patriarchal and institutional structures of power and control—the exclusionary mechanisms they face within and without community boundaries—to “make place” for themselves as individuals, as women, and as Muslims. By adopting the perspective of Muslim women “making place” in different aspects of Indian social life, we seek to highlight the many factors that shape Muslim women’s agency in the situations in which they find themselves. We show the multiple ways in which, regardless of specific differences, they are raising their voices against injustices in society and negotiating with fellow citizens, and with the Hindu majoritarian state in diverse ways. How they exercise their agency despite the odds stacked against them shows the journey they are on and the obstacles they have had to overcome—from being perceived as “voiceless victims” to a “threat” to dominant Hindu perceptions of Muslims in India—while they negotiate their rights and navigate exclusionary domestic and public spaces.