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

This paper examines how young Muslim women in Delhi create ethical responses to Hindu majoritarian politics through Islamic healing sessions, challenging liberal anthropological understanding of freedom. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnography, I analyze how participants of these sessions cultivate religious and affective practices that both acknowledge their marginalization and challenge its exclusionary logic. Extending Mbembe's "entangled temporalities," I introduce "affective temporality" to theorize how women create alternative experiences of temporal belongingness by invoking metaphysical sameness through expressions like "kyā farq hai?" (what's the difference?). Through collective spiritual practices, these women momentarily suspend the Hindu nationalist temporal order that positions them as perpetual outsiders. This study reconceptualizes freedom not as linear progression toward secular liberalism but as a temporal practice of interruption that generates what Elizabeth Povinelli terms "otherwise temporalities," revealing how subaltern subjects can destabilize the politics of difference through religious self-formation.