Aspiring Inside a Girls Madrasa: Gender, Negotiation and Change

This article draws on my ethnography of girls’ madrasas in India. It is woven around the ethnographic portrait of Zainab, 1 a rather reluctant madrasa student studying in a residential girls’ madrasa in Delhi who aspires to be a doctor. The article employs ethnographic portraiture to ‘focus in’ on Zainab’s educational journey and life in the madrasa, while also drawing attention to the larger canvas of intersecting forms of marginalisation, gender negotiations, and claim-making by Muslim women. It highlights how Muslim marginalisation intersects with gender disadvantage shaping everyday decisions about education, mobility and career choices. It argues that women’s negotiations and agency are nested in a larger context of marginalisation; while also co-constituting it. It examines Zainab’s life trajectory and aspirations to illustrate how education is a contradictory resource. At one level there is a synchrony between parents and madrasas on ideals of Islamic womanhood, but at another level, the piety project implemented by the madrasa does not represent the everyday experiences of madrasa students. The article argues that young women like Zainab, in attempting to balance madrasa prescriptions and their own aspirations, refashion gender norms through its inhabitation.