Young Muslim Women In India

This book, based on extensive, original research, details the changing lives of youth living in slum communities (bustees) in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Using young people’s own photos, art and narratives, the book explores how Muslim girls and young women are contributing to, and impacted by, changing youth culture in India. We are invited into the risky world of mixed-sex dance taking place in clandestine spaces in the slums. We join young people on their journeys to find premarital romance and witness their strategic and savvy risk taking when participating in transgressive aspects of consumer culture. The book reveals how social changes in India, including greater education and employment opportunities, as well as powerful middle class Muslim reform discourses, are impacting youth the very local level. More than just fantasy we see that Bollywood is an important role model which young people consult. By carefully negotiating risks and performing multiple identities inspired by modernity, globalization and, most of all, Bollywood culture, young people actively participate in a changing India and disrupt dominant discourses about slum youth as poor victims who are excluded from social change.

This book, based on extensive, original research, details the changing lives of youth living in slum communities (bustees) in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Using young people’s own photos, art and narratives, the book explores how Muslim girls and young women are contributing to, and impacted by, changing youth culture in India. We are invited into the risky world of mixed-sex dance taking place in clandestine spaces in the slums. We join young people on their journeys to find premarital romance and witness their strategic and savvy risk taking when participating in transgressive aspects of consumer culture. The book reveals how social changes in India, including greater education and employment opportunities, as well as powerful middle class Muslim reform discourses, are impacting youth the very local level. More than just fantasy we see that Bollywood is an important role model which young people consult. By carefully negotiating risks and performing multiple identities inspired by modernity, globalization and, most of all, Bollywood culture, young people actively participate in a changing India and disrupt dominant discourses about slum youth as poor victims who are excluded from social change.

This report locates the political, socio-economic and legal position of Muslim women within a historical framework, beginning with the evolution of Islam in India and its subsequent interaction with Indian society. It emphasizes the diversity of women in Muslim communities and the range of factors influencing their status. Kazi traces the developments in discourses of gender vis-à-vis Muslim women from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and describes Muslim women's transition from being British subjects to Indian citizens. Muslim women's contributions within the women's movement are outlined, as well as the challenges they face as members of India's largest religious minority community.

Muslim women have mostly been discussed and studied as passive victims who have no agency. Muslim Women Speak seeks to correct this by traversing an expansive canvas of dreams, aspirations, memory and everyday lives of both the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’ in an extensive study conducted in several states of India. Through a presentation and analysis of Indian Muslim women’s narratives about their own situation, the book challenges the image of Muslim women as historic victims of Islam and Muslim men. The book includes insights on the agency of young Muslim women and the impact of violence on their everyday lives after a violent ‘event’ or ‘episode’ passes into history and memory. It brings forth not only the ‘voices’ that have long been considered ‘silent’ but also dwells upon the epistemological and socio-political concerns of this ‘silencing’. In doing so, this book confronts the fault lines within the Indian feminist sisterhood and offers a considered critique of the women’s movement in India from within. The book will be mandatory reading for activists, government departments, policy planners, and students and scholars of gender studies and sociology.

Creates a new space for hybrid feminist analysis of Asian Muslim women’s lives. Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim women’s lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities. “Contesting Feminisms attempts to offer nuanced understandings of Muslim women’s struggles that are firmly rooted in close attention to local social, economic, and historical contexts with an eye to opening up theoretical spaces in which to examine local and transnational feminist Muslim activism. As such, the volume offers rich insights into women’s lives and struggles in moving away from the reductionist frame of a strictly Qur’anic view of women that is mobilized by both Western detractors and Islamic normativizers to constrain women’s agency, and instead brings into view the heterogeneity of Muslim women’s lives and struggles.” — Zayn Kassam, editor of Women and Islam

This collection of essays and articles captures the beginning of the Muslim women’s movement in India in the last two decades. Written at different points during the journey, these pieces provide a glimpse into the collective tumultuous journey of women demanding reform in Muslim family law in India and for equal citizenship without discrimination. This journey was undertaken by ordinary women under their own leadership. This collection highlights the challenges faced by women. It also celebrates successes such as the organization of women into groups, abolition of triple talaq and women’s entry into the mazar of Haji Ali Dargah. This book is a collection of articles written by authors, individually and jointly in various newspapers, magazines, journals and other publications. It challenges the misogynist regressive norms for women in family set by patriarchal religious groups. It calls for state accountability in providing safety, security and equality to Muslim citizens. Based on experiences and insights from grounded struggle of ordinary women, these essays give hope and provide strength in addressing discrimination through shared vision and collective democratic action. It calls out the failure of conservative religious leadership as well as elected representatives in providing an enabling environment to the community and particularly, women. It calls out certain feminists for their dual standards and for unsuccessful attempts to weaken the movement for reform in family law led by ordinary Muslim women.

This volume aims to look both at as well as beyond the ‘Delhi Gang Rape’ through the lens of Indian Media Studies. The editors consider it a critical event, or rather critical media event that needs to be contextualized within a rapidly changing, diversifying and globalizing Indian society which is as much confronted with new ruptures, asymmetries and inequalities as it may still be shaped by the old-established structures of a patriarchal social order. But the volume also looks beyond the ‘Delhi Gang Rape’ and introduces other related thematic areas of an emerging research field which links Youth, Media and Gender Studies.