The Everyday as Innovative: Reconsidering Relationships Between Muslim and Hindu Women in India

Abstract

This paper examines generational shifts in the relationships between Muslim and Hindu women in upwardly mobile neighborhoods of Udaipur, Rajasthan and ask how we might reconsider everyday practices as innovative acts for maintain community relationships and peace. Muslim and Hindu women’s everyday interactions with one another as they pass each other on the street, chat across steps, shop at one another’s stores, and/or keep watch over each others’ homes and children are fundamental to creating and sustaining religiously diverse neighborhoods. This paper analyzes the ways in which class mobility shapes these neighborhood relationships. Older generations of women have had to work together to collectively create middle-class neighborhoods and advocate for shifting class, religious, and gender norms. Alternatively, as their daughters have grown up in middle-class neighborhoods, their engagement with one another, and other young women from different religious traditions, has shifted somewhat, often taking place outside of the neighborhood, such as in schools or workplaces. This paper considers how class mobility enables, and requires, new and innovative ways of engaging with one another across generations and argues for how we can reconsider the mundane as innovative in terms of the localized work that women’s everyday interactions do to maintain interreligious relationships and peace in the broader contexts of rising Hindu nationalism.