Beyond the Law: Muslim Women’s Spatial Practices of Dissent

From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA is the first time in the post-colonial Indian legal landscape that religion is being used as a criterion for citizenship. The Act provides a path to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims. Amid countrywide protests emerged a unique political experience spearheaded by Muslim women. This paper focuses on a protest site in a working-class neighborhood of Chennai, India, to examine the everyday spatial practices of domestic and ritual life that Muslim women brought to such spaces. Through the solidarities forged at this site, often rendered through different forms of care—for each other, a community, a place, and diverse minoritized identities—the space transcended existing stereotypes of a “Muslim ghetto.” Muslim women were not just claiming space but creating place (Menon 2022). While there were recognizable signs of civil disobedience such as marches and protest slogans, this paper argues that the seemingly apolitical aspects of religious and social life—prayer, marriage, and domestic rituals—are also expressions of political and moral will. When protesters exclaim that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the demands of the state to prove one’s citizenship via documents. Although the protests were about a citizenship law, Muslim women were in fact pointing to various modes of belonging that cannot be captured by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.