Doing style for Saraswati Puja: Girlhood, Class, and Community Identity among Muslim girls in Assam

Abstract

Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning, is organised by youth clubs and educational institutions in eastern India. We draw on debates on girlhood, codes of respectable femininity in a neoliberal world, and how these play out for Muslim girls in the school context. These ideas frame our analysis of the dressing up practice among Muslim girls in a government school. We argue that the middle-class and ethnicised ideals of girlhood are amplified and reconfigured by the popular discourses on Saraswati Puja and add to the tensions over the appropriate code of dressing within the context of Puja at school. While the reality of girls’ lives is being shaped in novel ways, the Muslim girls engagement with the ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ through varied modes of ‘doing style’ put them under contrary pressures in public places like school. In such a scenario, their accounts of dressing up and participating in this event serve as a vantage point to understand how girlhood is being construed and experienced from varied positions of class, caste, age, and community. These accounts highlight Muslim girls’ engagement with the codes of femininity in the majoritarian cultural universe of a school.