“Mera Jamia, Mera Ghar”: The Corporeal Collective Willfulness of Young Muslim Women in CAA-NRC Protests in India

• In Event: Justice, Social movements, and Protest in/through Education

Proposal

Passed in December 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act in India intensified Hindu majoritarian rule, emerging as another legal measure to systematically denying citizenship to Muslims and other minoritized populations. These legislations were met by protests which were responded to by police violence. Young Muslim women at Jamia Milia Islamia University followed the lead of elders in Shaheen Bagh, crafting an intergenerational feminist-led protest which emerged at the forefront of resistance efforts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi during the surge of these anti-government protests, this paper attends to young women’s embodied spatiotemporal claims of recognition and belonging. I dwell on the collectivity and corporeal nature of their engagement and highlight the theoretical significance of this unwavering collective still presence that characterizes their participation. In an India that increasingly questions their belonging, student protestors make embodied claims to the university, public space, and by extension, the nation, as home.

Scholarship on how women’s bodies figure in colonial and nationalist rule and struggle, Muslim women’s political movements, and solidarities between minoritized women prove important in the analytic reading of this contemporary moment. Feminist scholars have noted how the bodies of women and girls have been central in establishing colonial rule (McKlintock 1995; Stoler 1995); they have similarly been crucial to anti-colonial struggles around the nation and bolstering various kinds of nationalisms (Sinha 2006; Mani 1989). Within South Asia, women’s bodies and honor have been used in the creation of physical and conceptual borders and partitions (Lukose and Loomba 2012). Women’s bodies have also been significant in the Hindu right wing’s crafting of exclusionary ideas of homeland.
Feminist scholarship around movements and protest is instructive for theorizing how the collective labor of young women at Jamia University destabilizes Hindutva ideas of homeland and reframes home and belonging. Raka Ray (2000) conceptualizes earlier women’s movements across Bombay and Calcutta in the late 19th century as political fields, placing weight on “the constitution of the collective subject (and her interests) through her participation in a matrix of political possibilities” (p.19). The political field has depth, width, and breadth; that is, it is situated in a historical and geographically specific context and galvanizes momentum. More recent feminist scholars call for attention to the relational, intimate, `affective and embodied dimensions of public protests suggesting a move away from theorizations that solely attend to how states are transformed (Hasso and Salime 2016). This theorization expands Ray’s political fields as it becomes constitutive of the corporeal and affective.
I illustrate how corporeal gendered labor bolsters and sustains the anti-CAA efforts. In Hasso and Salime’s synthesis of feminist scholarship on Middle Eastern revolutionary spaces, they reflect on how women and girls claim cities, streets, neighborhoods, and cyberspace, creating new relationships to space and to others, building new sensibilities and communities. Similarly, young Muslim women in India hung onto and crafted new spaces and definitions of home with their bodies. Shaheen Bagh becomes a space for Muslim women’s collectivity and resistance which further stimulates the commitments of young university going women at Jamia Milia Islamia University. The sustained presence refutes the Modi government regime’s temporal orders.
Undergirding the corporeal landscape through which belonging is claimed is a sense of what I call collective willfulness or the willfulness of collective bodies. Sara Ahmed (2014) invites us to view willfulness as a style of politics cultivated through engagement in struggles to exist, and desires to transform certain kinds of existence. Willfulness, is a defiance of the will, or a refusal to subject one’s will. The collective willfulness enacted by the young women at Jamia University refuses state directives, is derived from simultaneous fear and rage. This collective willfulness is anchored in firm attachments to home as an expanded political site, and contestations around Hindu nationalist constructions of home. In what follows, I illustrate features of this corporeal, collective willfulness. Detailing their narratives about the night of December 15th when police barged onto their campus grounds, I show how the young women make embodied claims to space that are attached to feelings of home.

Author

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University