Abstract
In postcolonial India, narratives about Muslim women have revolved around tropes, such as tin talaq (divorce), purdah (veil), polygamy and Islam. These have always played a significant role to shape their homogenised identity: an existence of oppression and subordination. However, the paper will try to argue that the marginalisation of Muslim women is not only structural but also discursive (popular as well as religious), which produce them as ‘victims’ and ‘voiceless others’. The paper will also try to argue that Muslim women have already been discursively produced as incapable of progressive thinking, and waging struggle against their subordination. Therefore, the paper shall make an attempt to examine the impact of popular as well as Islamic discourses in shaping the identity of Muslim women in India, and locate those alternative spaces, where Muslim women can challenge their homogenised existence as a category as well as dominant discourses on their victimhood.
Highlights
Discourses do not automatically cause social inequalities but that they are both indicative of the position of any group within a given society and provide a justificatory context in which inequities can arise, persist, and even be made to seem normal (Sarkar, 2008: 199)
As experiences of Muslim women are mediated through the discourses of Islam, religious patriarchy and community, a meaningful and collective resistance is possible through a common discursive sharing
It is quite clear that a powerful instrument for maintaining the marginalisation of Muslim women in postcolonial India was their invisibility in intellectual as well as public discourses
Summary
Discourses do not automatically cause social inequalities but that they are both indicative of the position of any group within a given society and provide a justificatory context in which inequities can arise, persist, and even be made to seem normal (Sarkar, 2008: 199). Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning They constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern (Weedon, 1987: 108). The paper argues that the identity construction of Muslim women is a continuous production of discursive practices and tradition This argument does not deny the significance of factors like socioeconomic marginalisation, discriminations, policies of the derelict Indian state in perpetuating their subordination, etc. It argues that Islamic discursive tradition and practices may further reinforce Muslim women’s marginalisation in community as well as in society. The paper argues that the identity of Muslim women is shaped by dominant discourses and by alternative discourses, which tend to show that identity and subjectivity are not fixed rather in a state of continuous making
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