@article{FormationsofTamilIslam:Belonging:4833,
      recid = {4833},
      author = {Kumar, Harini},
      title = {Formations of Tamil Islam: Belonging, Place, and  Historical Consciousness in South India},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {220},
      abstract = {This dissertation is an ethnography of Muslim belonging in  contemporary south India. It examines the practices through  which Muslims in Tamil Nadu sustain longstanding  attachments to diverse traditions, histories, and places,  at a time when non-national and non-Hindu forms of affinity  are increasingly treated with suspicion by a prejudicial  state. By attending to sensibilities that exceed both the  totalizing logics of Hindu majoritarian oppression and  prevailing antagonisms such as Hindu vs. Muslim or majority  vs. minority, this ethnography attempts to open up an  analytical and historical space to consider how inherited  traditions and genealogical ties endure in the present, and  why they matter.		
The place of Muslims in Indian society  has been one of the most contentious issues in postcolonial  India. Especially under the current Hindu nationalist  regime, Muslims are treated in a variety of exclusionary  ways, with the deeply xenophobic notion of Muslims as  outsiders and invaders now a largely acceptable one in  public discourse. As a result, it has become increasingly  difficult to consider Muslim religiosity, ritual life, and  ethical practices without analytically tethering them to  Hindutva’s aggressive dominance. Given this context, this  dissertation asks: how can we understand contemporary  Muslim life outside the shadow of the Hindutva discourse?  In doing so, this dissertation highlights alternative modes  of cultivating self and community that offer a  counter-hegemonic narrative precisely because they are not  conceived of in the language of “resistance” (to Hindutva  or other dominant ideologies that seek to coopt them), even  as they are embedded in a national context where Hindutva  is a salient force. By “alternative modes” I am referring  less to recognizable practices—protest and civil  disobedience, or a recourse to law—that have emerged as a  direct response to Hindu nationalism, and more to ways of  life that draw upon longstanding forms of Islamic  religiosity, kinship, historical consciousness, ethical  striving, and place-making. I trace these overlapping  threads of Muslim life in order to show how these  heterogenous formations come to inhere in a society that I  broadly refer to as Tamil Muslim. 

Drawing on ethnographic  research conducted across Tamil Nadu, I argue that we  cannot understand Muslim belonging without considering the  everyday forms of relatedness between people, places, and  non-humans in a plurality of sites through which people  forge their commitment to specific ethicopolitical projects  and orient themselves to an Islamic way of life in a Tamil  milieu. This work seeks to push past statist discourses of  citizenship toward a more expansive understanding of  belonging that draws on longer histories and traditions  whose vitality in the present, however fraught and  uncertain, precedes the dominant notion that belonging can  only be mediated by the nation-state and its technologies  of exclusion.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4833},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4833},
}