Marvi's Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan

This dissertation asks what belonging looks like for Hindu communities living in Pakistan as religious minorities in a modern Muslim polity. It examines how mutual imbrications of the state and the domestic shape political aspirations, everyday lives, and intimate relations. I focus on the lives of Hindu women in the province of Sindh to explore the relationship between the state, the domestic, and the religious other using ethnographic and archival data. Soon after the creation of Pakistan in 1947 the government pledged that those who did not identify with Islam would be governed as minority citizens of a nation-state. At the same time, Pakistan explicitly disavowed the secular discourses underpinning such guarantees of minority citizenship. Since then, that promise of citizenship has vacillated between discriminatory neglect and overt regulation of religious minorities. In turn Hindus negotiate around such practices in various creative ways, to imagine different modes of political claim-making in their ancestral homes. Meanwhile, the anxieties and pitfalls about having been rendered strangers in such a place seep into the everyday: from neighborly or intimate relations, through the constitution of domestic life, to embodied histories and practices. In such a landscape, I examine how the vicissitudes of everyday life can inform alternative modalities of belonging and exclusion. Through the interpellation of governance techniques with intimate social relations, I explore how Pakistan’s aspirations to modern Islamic statehood depend on the lives and loves of its Hindu minority communities