Between Migration and Exile: Muslim Women's Geographies of Citizenship in India

Abstract

Against the backdrop of India's 2019 Islamophobic Citizenship Amendment Act, this article is based on ethnographic research with young Muslim women from Aligarh which aimed to show that their narratives of displacement and exclusion from citizenship inspired their search for belonging and enabled them to reinscribe spaces with their own, marginalised, but nonetheless real, projects of belonging. From exclusion and debasement springs new imagination of belonging: this is my finding. Drawing on intersectional feminist writings, postcolonial and critical Muslim studies, I propose that Muslim women's geographies become forms of contestation of the national project producing non-citizens. In this context, I trace the interconnections between physical and spiritual geographies to show us how Muslim women continue to carve space for themselves.