Freedom as discontinuous: Muslim Women's Ethical Responses to Hindu Majoritarianism in Contemporary India

This paper examines how young Muslim women in contemporary India cultivate ethical responses to Hindu majoritarian politics through self-organized Islamic healing sessions, fundamentally reconceptualizing the Eurocentric anthropological understandings of freedom as opposed to religion. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi's Batla House, I analyze two initiatives—Hidayah and Nisa's Batcheet—where college-educated and professional Muslim women create alternative modes of temporal and affective being that challenge their positioning as perpetual outsiders within the national imagination. The sessions I observed at Hidayah and Nisa's Batcheet form intimate spaces where women gather weekly to connect with other Muslim women, creating community through shared spiritual practices and mutual understanding. In effect, these sessions act as spaces of belonging within India's increasingly constricted public sphere, offering vital outlets where women can articulate feelings and experiences that find no space for expression elsewhere in their lives. Through this shared vulnerability, they cultivate what Saba Mahmood terms "ethical self-formation"—not as an individualistic project of self-improvement but as a collective endeavor to inhabit alternative temporal and affective registers.

While not explicitly focused on sharing stories of discrimination, participants of these sessions often describe their collective vulnerabilities through statements like "hawa mein kufti hai" (suffocation hangs in the air)—an atmospheric sense of precarity that permeates their everyday personal and professional lives. Concurrently, women use these sessions to discipline their affective and ethical selves to navigate and negotiate belongingness. They do so by frequently expressing sentiments of sameness through rhetorical questions like "kyā farq hai?" (what's the difference?), evoking metaphysical sameness and finding cultural commonality with the non-Muslim "other." At the same time, they engage in collective du'a, share vulnerabilities, perform embodied group breathing exercises, and discuss passages from the Quran that emphasize universal humanity—affective practices that cultivate an emotional resilience.

Building on Achille Mbembe's (2001) concept of "entangled temporalities," I introduce the concept of "affective temporality" to theorize how women create such alternative experiences of temporal belongingness in contemporary India. I suggest that through sensorial and affective self-cultivation women intentionally construct moments where the metaphysical sameness and divine love of all beings supersedes their perceived racialized difference or farq. In so doing, they effectively suspend the Hindu nationalist temporal order that positions them as perpetual outsiders. Where Mbembe highlights how postcolonial subjects inhabit multiple, overlapping temporal registers that shape their subjectivity, I focus specifically on how Muslim women's affective and religious self-cultivation creates temporal entanglements as an ethical practice. 

The study intervenes in anthropological theorizations of freedom by destabilizing the linear temporality upon which liberal conceptions of emancipation traditionally depend. Where anthropology has often privileged a teleological understanding of freedom as progressive movement toward secular individualism, this ethnography reveals freedom as a discontinuous, non-linear temporal practice operating within religious frameworks. The Muslim women in this study enact create interruptive moments that suspend the hegemonic chronopolitical ordering of difference inherent in Hindu nationalist discourse. These temporal interstices constitute not an escape from but a momentary reconfiguration of the temporal structures that regulate belonging in contemporary India.

This analysis challenges anthropological frameworks that have predominantly conceptualized freedom through Western liberal notions of individual autonomy and secular resistance to religious constraints. My ethnography reveals how these Muslim women enact freedom precisely through religious practice and collective spiritual cultivation. Their pursuit of freedom operates not through rejecting religious frameworks but by deepening engagement with Islamic metaphysics to create alternative temporal and affective experiences. This fundamentally challenges anthropological tendencies to position religion—particularly Islam—as antithetical to liberatory politics.

This ethnography thus reveals freedom not as a state to be achieved but as a temporal practice of interruption and reconfiguration. The temporal interstices these women create reveal how subaltern subjects can inhabit multiple temporal registers simultaneously, destabilizing not only the boundaries between self and other that underpin racialized politics of exclusion but also anthropology's conventional framing of freedom as secular liberation from tradition. In conclusion, women's practices of freedom reveal the contingency of hegemonic temporal frameworks while simultaneously enacting alternative possibilities of belonging.