Formations of Tamil Islam: Belonging, Place, and Historical Consciousness in South India

This dissertation is an ethnography of Muslim belonging in contemporary south India. It examines the practices through which Muslims in Tamil Nadu sustain longstanding attachments to diverse traditions, histories, and places, at a time when non-national and non-Hindu forms of affinity are increasingly treated with suspicion by a prejudicial state. By attending to sensibilities that exceed both the totalizing logics of Hindu majoritarian oppression and prevailing antagonisms such as Hindu vs. Muslim or majority vs. minority, this ethnography attempts to open up an analytical and historical space to consider how inherited traditions and genealogical ties endure in the present, and why they matter. The place of Muslims in Indian society has been one of the most contentious issues in postcolonial India. Especially under the current Hindu nationalist regime, Muslims are treated in a variety of exclusionary ways, with the deeply xenophobic notion of Muslims as outsiders and invaders now a largely acceptable one in public discourse. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to consider Muslim religiosity, ritual life, and ethical practices without analytically tethering them to Hindutva’s aggressive dominance. Given this context, this dissertation asks: how can we understand contemporary Muslim life outside the shadow of the Hindutva discourse? In doing so, this dissertation highlights alternative modes of cultivating self and community that offer a counter-hegemonic narrative precisely because they are not conceived of in the language of “resistance” (to Hindutva or other dominant ideologies that seek to coopt them), even as they are embedded in a national context where Hindutva is a salient force. By “alternative modes” I am referring less to recognizable practices—protest and civil disobedience, or a recourse to law—that have emerged as a direct response to Hindu nationalism, and more to ways of life that draw upon longstanding forms of Islamic religiosity, kinship, historical consciousness, ethical striving, and place-making. I trace these overlapping threads of Muslim life in order to show how these heterogenous formations come to inhere in a society that I broadly refer to as Tamil Muslim. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across Tamil Nadu, I argue that we cannot understand Muslim belonging without considering the everyday forms of relatedness between people, places, and non-humans in a plurality of sites through which people forge their commitment to specific ethicopolitical projects and orient themselves to an Islamic way of life in a Tamil milieu. This work seeks to push past statist discourses of citizenship toward a more expansive understanding of belonging that draws on longer histories and traditions whose vitality in the present, however fraught and uncertain, precedes the dominant notion that belonging can only be mediated by the nation-state and its technologies of exclusion