The Chamars affiliated to the Dera Sachkhand Ballan, Punjab have demanded recognition of the Ravidassia religion from the Indian state, in the Census 2021. This demand sprung from the popular aspiration of a section of the Chamars of Punjab, who announced a separate religion in 2010 at the dera. The caste-based marginalisation of the Chamars in Punjab and the tensions emerging from the attacks on sants Niranjan Das and Ramanand Das by the Sikh radicals, had caused the Ravidassias to rally behind their distinct religious symbols and sites of worship. The discourse over governmental safeguards to the Ravidassias as Scheduled Castes doesn’t challenge the idea of the pristine past and its present manifestation in the form of the nationalist abstraction, the way the demand for religious recognition does. The Ravidassias have their own distinct idea of the past- the victor and the vanquished, one that upsets the postcolonial Indian national narrative of the golden past and its protagonists. The existing notion of nationhood merges and integrates several religions into one singular abstraction of national identity, minimising and muting the genealogies of the marginalised and excluded sections.

The Ravidassias trace their history to the Ad Dharm movement and question the dominant Jat Sikh belief in Punjab, that there can be no living guru apart from the guru incarnate- the Guru Granth Sahib. At present, the Indian state officially recognizes the Ravidassias and the Sikhs under the Hindu religious identity. While the Jat Sikhs have remained dominant in terms of ownership and control of economic and religious capital in Punjab, the Ravidassias have remained marginalised. The assertion of a distinct religious identity by the Ravidassias is therefore an attempt to offset the effects of the unfair power differentials caused by the dominance of Jat Sikhs in Punjab, by their recognition as a separate religious group from the Indian state.

The postcolonial Indian state excludes the religious minorities from political safeguards such as the administrative mechanisms for protection of their rights, government job quotas, reservation of seats in the legislature and reservation of cabinet posts. Extending these group-based protections to the ‘Scheduled Caste’, and preclusion of religious minorities on the grounds that provisions based on religious identity could harm the national unity stems from the postcolonial legacy of privileging the Hindu religious identity as the only legitimate national imagination.

Constitutional protection to the Scheduled Castes is made contingent on their relationship with the Hindu religious identity. According to the Constitution (Scheduled Caste) Order 1950, “no person who professes a religion different from the Hindu (the Sikh or the Buddhist) religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste”. The constitutional narrative doesn’t treat protections provided to the Scheduled Caste communities as necessary measures bringing reparation to the communities who faced historic injustices, but as time-bound measures geared at uplifting the sub-groups of Hindu religion. Through such narratives, the state makes the Hindu religion the organic social terrain on which identities and affiliations become mapped, thereby legitimizing the vocabulary of the dominant community despite its own avowal to upholding secularism.

The absence of these group rights for the Sikhs, but it’s extension to the dalit Sikhs is justified on the grounds that according to the Article 25 (b) of the Indian constitution, “reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion”. This religious consciousness of the state prevents it from acknowledging rights and protections owed to communities on grounds of social and historic injustices. The abstract notion of Indian national imagination therefore is an exercise in accommodating groups within the Hindu national identity.

This paper argues that the demand of the Chamars of the dera Sachkhand Ballan in Punjab, to be identified as a separate religious community of the Ravidassias, is unacceptable to the postcolonial Indian state on account of its own concealed religious character. This unaddressed and unacknowledged religious character of the Indian state gets obscured by the narratives of national unity and secularism. The Ravidassia assertion for a distinct and separate religion exposes this majoritarian national imagination and its justificatory narratives.

In the midst of precipitating socio-political contestation, increased ascendancy of right-wing ideologies, rising hate campaigns, intolerance, discord and violence, it becomes critical to pay heed to the myriad negotiations that inflect lived experiences of excluded and targeted communities in different parts of the world. Our expanding urban centres serve as ready sites, where these negotiations are played out. Urban life, together with its tussles and challenges as well as real prospects of moving up the ladder, differently impacts diverse resident communities, spelling differential implications for their everyday existence.

Rooted in India’s chaotic urban context, this paper maps the production of exclusivist spatial imaginaries and cornered social communities. It shows how socio-spatial boundaries are produced and deepened from time to time through the complicity of varying state and non-state actors, and urban geographies of fear come to be crafted. To the newcomer, these boundaries may seem abstract and intangible, for they cannot be readily discerned and delineated. But, to the informed, and the experienced, they are highly concretised markers for the obvious role they play in dividing and differentiating communities and neighbourhoods.

Set in Bhopal, a burgeoning city in central India and a strong bastion of Hindu nationalist politics, the paper discusses how fraught processes of boundary making are encountered and experienced by Muslim residents who constitute a large and internally diversified, yet visibly excluded and embattled, religious minority group in the city and the country as a whole. By weaving together their lifeworlds and narrated histories, it seeks to draw out the multiple negotiations that frame the everyday existence of city Muslims. Their recurrent efforts, slated to overcome deepening insecurity, prejudice and presumptive hostility get examined, while their withdrawal or internment within specific neighbourhoods, on account of steady emergence of communally segregated housing comes to be flagged.

The paper calls attention to this gradual consolidation of invisible, yet often impermeable, mental borders. Further, it spotlights persistent attempts of Bhopal Muslims to make place, to carve out more amenable modes of being, in the face of their everyday realities. In doing so, it surveys the local and, at once, goes beyond to interrogate the wider processes of production of fractured urban geographies and splintering of social relations.

The past decade has seen a considerable rise in religious and communal violence in India that has predominantly targeted specific minority groups. The moral cartography of violence has come to be increasingly justified in terms of transgression. Incidents of lynching against Muslims and Dalits have been justified in the name of protection of cow, violence over Love Jihad has been excused in the name of protection of Hindu women’s honor, and the (mis) portrayal of ‘Hindu images’ in the popular culture has allegedly crossed a boundary. The idea of transgression lies at the heart of justifiability of violence, and hence, it becomes essential to analyze the its role in the production and placement of minorities. Due to its diverse historical past, mixt populace, and tumultuous societal fluctuations, the study on transgression finds a fertile zone in the Indian region. These transgressions can be diverse, pre-mediated or even unintended and are significant in promoting transformation, conflicts or even stability. Moreover, transgressions carry within themselves a certain contingency that holds the potential to hurl events in all directions, thereby planting the seed for the unexpected. Considering this capacity of transgressions, the article aims to understand how transgressions have unfolded within the Indian socio-political thought and what conditions have helped pave the way for accelerated transgression dynamics. The article will also argue that minorities carry within them an imprint of transgression that is articulated within the rubric of majoritarian polity.

Tamil-Mauritian public religiosity has historically been heavily regulated by both colonial and postcolonial regimes, prompting controversial self- reinventions by the community’s elites. This communication plans to historicize these tensions alongside the celebration of the Thaipousom Cavadee (Taippūcam Kāvaṭi) festival, across the 20th century. Through the lenses of gender, class and caste, the Mauritian Cavadee constitutes a pivotal longue durée microhistory of post-indenture diasporic politics. I argue that the annual procession served as the religious sanctification of territorial claims on civic respectability, by permanent negotiations between devotees, religious patrons and the Mauritian state.

First, I will locate the origins of God Murugan’s cult across the colonial establishment of devotee communites, through temple constructions and the entrepreneurship of powerful upper-caste patrons. Emerging from this religious- political milieu, early 20th century Cavadee processions rapidly grew in size and popularity. Temples’ origin narratives and processional poetry point to the growing influence of a Tamil upper-caste landlorship and its claim upon the insular space, mediated by the pilgrimage. Second, I will analyze the way Murugan worship was theologically fashioned by intellectual intermediaries from the creation of the Indian state (1947) and the Tamil one (1954) to Mauritian independence (1968). Coming from different caste backgrounds and straddling rival political allegiances, these clerical reformists synthesized Cavadee as a symbol of Tamil-Mauritian identity. Attention will be given on their common opposition to antinomic rituals, and social connections to the upper-caste polity. Third, I will compare the many recuperations of Cavadee worship in the last three decades of the century, indicative of the cult’s unquestioned foundation. Though divergent, Tamil-Mauritian socialists and dravidianists both curated Cavadee in original ways, as a public expression of revolutionary pride. But as the politically influent former group didn’t challenge lineages of caste and patronage, I question the pilgrimage’s conservative roots and its relevance to the Hindu Majoritarian project.

The thrust of indigenous historians of Manipur still remains in establishing Manipur’s past as an independent nation-state. The need for a national history of Manipur emerged as a response to the merger of Manipur with India and against the project of integrating Manipur’s early history with smṛti or the remembered tradition of the Indian civilisation, particularly the Mahabharata. In the national history of Manipur, history of the Meiteis, one of indigenous communities in Manipur, occupies the centre stage as it is held that Meitei feudal lords were the ones who controlled the territory which we now called Manipur before British colonised it. In this national history, many communities of Manipur such as the Pangal Muslims are left out. The paper attempts to understand the representation of the minority Pangal Muslims in the national history writing of Manipur. The representation of Pangals in the historiography of Manipur needs to be discussed because Pangals are time and again compelled to show their role in the making of the Manipur nation. Moreover, not only many scholars have been silent about the role of Pangals in the nation building of Manipur but also their subjugation at the hands of the Meitei feudal lords finds no place in the historiography of the national history. The paper argues that, in the historiography of Manipur, Pangal community has been treated as a community without an independent existence and as silent. I see this as an extension of the social exclusion that Pangal Muslims have faced since the late nineteenth century as amangba (or polluted) because of their religion and ethnicity. For this paper, I take as sources the national histories of Manipur and the indigenous Meitei texts, known as puyas. Most importantly, I take as sources the puya-s pertaining to the Pangal Muslims such as Nongsamei or The Chronicles of the Pangal Muslims.

The crisis of secularism in India has been studied extensively in the North Indian context especially because the Hindi heartland of the country has been a fertile ground for violent religious fundamentalism. But the problem of minoritization cannot be simplistically restricted to that of unabashed religious marginalization or demographic statistics. The popular narratives in progressive and academic circles posit Kerala as one of the most secular and democratic spaces in India. It is majorly because of the high literacy rate and the longue durée of communist regime in the state government. However, a deep critical enquiry into the sphere of Malayalam literature undercuts any sweeping claims of equality made by political leaders at the helm of statist power. The experiences of caste discrimination and social ostracism that remain elusive in the official documents of the statist archives have been articulated incisively by litterateurs who were direct victims of this extreme subjugation. In the proposed paper, I will resituate the politics of minoritization that the democratic communists have resorted to in Kerala through systematically silencing of the voices from below for maintaining their status quo in constitutional politics. The primary text in consideration is an anthology of short stories originally in Malayalam that has been translated into English and published as Don’t Want Caste – Malayalam Stories by Dalit Writers (2017). The idea of Dalitness becomes especially important in this regard because it is not simply restricted as an appellation for people who have been historically marginalized as untouchable, unseeable or unapproachable by religious dogmas. In opposition to such a divisive hierarchical approach of the pollution-purity matrix, the figure of the ‘Dalit’ constitutes a significant field of contestation to the dominant regional/national identity. It further questions the forceful imposition of unity in diversity by the postcolonial nation-state. My paper will also engage with the short story as a literary form that democratizes the cultural space by revealing the existing aporia in a seemingly left liberal socio-political sphere. An enquiry into the Dalit problem in Kerala questions the overarching claim of the state being an exception to the existing hegemonic structures of the country at large and underlines the necessity of active resistance through literary and artistic productions.

Within modern nation-states, the idea of secularism is intimately linked to ‘tolerance’; here, toleration is of differences that are conspicuous or unassimilable within the naturalized imagination of a nation. This particular work seeks to critically examine how the discursive technique of toleration is produced by centering the experiences of Sikhs as a minority group in India. The toleration thesis is historically embedded in the liberal Westphalian model; a minority culture was tolerated if it was willing to show subordination or total subservience in the form of ‘loyalty’ to the nation-state. The epistemic category of ‘loyal’ or ‘disloyal subject’ is an essential framework through which nation-states interact with the ethnic minority in question; for the category to function, both actors must be affirmed and reproduced in this dialectic relationship. However, what if one of the partners defies expectations? The Sikh experience as a minority, descriptively seen as the sword-arm of the majority community, helps to unpack the conceptualization of ‘loyalty’ and the fractured nature of such concepts.

The concept of secularism came under enormous strain during the moment – now commonly registered as – the Khalistan militancy. To examine this strain, I will focus on the desertions or mutiny of fifteen hundred Sikh soldiers in the wake of Operation Bluestar. These desertions have to be contextualized in the (post)colonial project of objectifying communities; the same objectified ethnicities were then employed in the service of making the Indian nation. The secular Indian army promotes re-sacralization of the bonds between the Sikh community and the nation by reinforcing the symbolic religious worldview of Sikhs in armed forces. The Sikh soldier is loyal both to the nation and his religion. When the secular becomes overburdened with tolerating an assertive religious minority, as evident in the events of 1984, the rupture produces a disloyal subject whose difference becomes ‘intolerable.’ I will attempt to locate the logical limits of toleration in the modern day secular nation by concentrating on the mutiny of a ‘loyal minority subject.’

This paper marks the transformation of question on citizenship and belonging among Muslims in South Indian state, Kerala since 1920. Study analyses the discourses around citizenship, belonging and claims on public by Muslim actors at two different crucial periods of the contemporary Kerala. First it will look how the notion of belonging and citizenship debated during the emergence of linguistic welfare subject hood and Second, after the decline of welfare subject hood in 1990s. Muslim Movements after the 1990s respond to the question of citizenship and crisis of democracy in India by invoking their own resources and plays an important role in contesting and constructing citizenship.

By using various Malayalam print magazine run by Muslims in the Travancore state first part of the paper demonstrate how Muslim actors engaged with emerging Kerala linguistic statehood and public space. Using case studies of PDP(People Democratic Party) and Solidarity Youth Movement thesis shows how post 90 neo liberal phase and erosion of social citizenry of Muslims at national level necessitated emergence of radical ethical citizenry and voluntarism and the shift from Citizenship to ethical citizenship to the Muslim religious space along with the return of religion in to the social and public space. Within changing conditions of citizenship, notions related to the modern construction of community are also facing fragmentation. By drawing from my ethnographic materials from newly emerged Muslim Barber Social movements, a close reading of an article that was rejected by Muslim magazines and later found a new currency among the barber community through manual circulation in Northern Kerala and an analysis of a newly published and well received Malayalam novel Ossathi by Beena on the barber community and their struggle within the Muslim community paper shows how question of social , which was supposed to be subsumed within the modern formation of community (Ummah) along with Nation, emerging as a critique and re-imagination of tradition Thus paper argued that the emergence of this new Muslim Movements should be under stood in the context of citizenship politics that

evolving around new modes of governing practices by which national state disperse and negotiate with its subject.

After winning their battle with the Gōrkhālī forces in the early nineteenth century, the British constructed “Bīr Gōrkhālī” (~brave Gurkhas) as a gendered-martial-race and that construction eventually became the epitome of nationalism for the modern Nepali State. The male-dominated Hindu Nepali State used the Bīr Gōrkhālī narrative also by promoting the hegemonic Hindu masculine identity that was started by the British within their Gurkha army. The Nepali State’s singular imagination of its people attempted to erase multiple minority religious, ethnic, and language identities in the past. This paper deals with the overlaps among race, nation, gender, and religion and demonstrates how the powerful define, legitimise, and exploit these categories for their own benefits. As the British were the most powerful colonial rulers in South Asia, they had an upper hand in defining what masculinity was and how certain groups, like the Gurkhas, were more martial and therefore more masculine than the others, like the Bengalis. The colonising British firmly believed in the erroneous “martial race theory” which attributes that some “races” are more “warlike,” and others are “effeminate.” The recruitment of specific “races” by the British into their

army is the manifestation of masculinity; the bravest-of-the-brave rhetoric still continues to build the Gurkha identity that continually fosters military masculinity in these men. The British exercised their power to build a strong narrative about the “martial races” and used the “native” men in their armies to occupy, control, and govern (new) territories. The construction of the Gurkhas as a race and gender by the British helped the Nepali State cash in the rhetoric that Nepalis are brave, therefore, as a nation, they are superior to the others, especially non-hill populations of India and minorities of Nepal’s southern plains.

In ‘Art of Protest’, T.V. Reed remarks that while widely overlooked in protest studies, the cultural symbolization of social movements is a deliberate and pointed act, key to the public sustenance, widespread proliferation and cultural preservation of a movement (2005). This is especially apparent in the case of the 101-day long anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and anti-National Register of Citizens (NRC) protests in Shaheen Bagh (2019-2020), which produced new waves in protest cultures in South Asia. While much has been written heralding the ‘new Muslim woman’ figure in the protest (Bhatia & Gajjala 2020; Pasha 2020), there is little analysis into everyday minoritized negotiations of Muslim womanhood in the frameworks of protest. This paper argues that despite the minority-fronted origin of the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, the long-term sustenance and expansive engagement of the masses in the Shaheen Bagh protests stepped away from minoritized assertions, by culturally coding of narratives of secular constitutionalism.

Drawing from social movement theorists such as Reed, Buechler, Costanza-Chock and others, I seek to analyse how the cultural materials produced in Shaheen Bagh—such as murals, protest installations, posters, memes and slogans—narrativized secular nationalism. I seek to present, further, how this involved simultaneously distancing from minority assertions and corresponding to binaries of good Muslim/bad Muslim; nationalism/anti-nationalism in order to create a ‘popular’ protest. Finally, I seek to present how these uncomfortable negotiations with citizenship implicitly create conditions of the peripheralization of minorities, even while seemingly representing them.