124 – Muslim Counterpublics in the Indian Nation-state Public Sphere

October 2, 2025
8:30 am
UGX60
This panel will bring together emerging and advanced scholars of Muslim identity in South Asia in the context of the nation-state public sphere. We wish to explore the deep history and contemporary imaginings of Muslimness from the vantage point of songs, music and sound, literary studies, history, anthropology, dastangoi, oral historiography, and cinema. We aim to shed light on the multiperspectival and pan-national Muslim identification process as it also intersects with ideas of ideological homogenisation, modernity, and religious revivalism. We wish to foreground Muslim lived-experience narratives across disciplines to discuss the Muslim in South Asia as a category of practicing, subverting and reclaiming agency. Our panel is also envisioned as a growing space for registering, archiving and centralizing Muslim voices. This is at a time of immense precarity affecting a community which not only suffers from internal fragmentation but is also in dire need of a unified, coherent and all-inclusive political consciousness. Proposed papers in our panel will thus explore junctures, events, overlaps, and nodes, situated across time and space, which act as vestibules between the idea of “Muslimness” and its various unfurlings in the public and counterpublic sphere. Therefore proposed papers in this panel will explore linkages of Muslim identification with religiosity, class, caste, gender, hegemonies, place making, pioneership, and rootedness. The aim is to move beyond problematizing authority, representation and mis-representation to invest in narratives which are first-person, self-reflexive, agency specific and advance critical foresight.

Convenor

Shahwar Kibria Maqhfi

Presentations

Glitch in the matrix: The Bajis and Indian Digital Space
Noman Madiha - University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Muslim World Visions In Hyderabadi Mushā’irah
Casadei Maria - Doctoral School in the Humanities, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
World-Making from the ‘Margins’: Muslim Global Actors from South Asia
Reetz Dietrich - Dept. Political Science, external member, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Fraternity Movement as Counter-Public
Chacko Mary Ann - School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India
Sacred Masculinities and Islam: A case study of “Rangila Rasul”
Anwari Mohammad Ahsan Masood - South Asia Institute, University fo Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
‘Thallumaala’, Muslim HipHop and ‘Mappila Cool’ in Kerala
Radhakrishnan Mukulika - Dept. of History, School of Media, Arts, and Humanities, University of Sussex, Brighton & Hove, United Kingdom
Islam Comes Alive After Every Karbala: Shifts in the Nature of Muslim Authority in Hindu Nationalist Times
Taneja Anand - Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, United States