Book Dialogue | Jeffrey A. Redding reflects on Sagnik Dutta's 'In the Shadow of Minority Rights'

The Muslim situation in contemporary India is notoriously fraught. Still reeling from the British colonial decision in 1947 to ‘partition’ a large swath of the Indian subcontinent into two states—one Muslim-majority called ‘Pakistan’ and another majority-Hindu called ‘India’—Indian institutions and individuals alike express daily disdain for the tens of millions Muslims who are Indian citizens. Excoriated for their dietary preferences, stereotyped for having too many spouses and children, and denied housing opportunities in many parts of India’s largest metropolises, there is almost no aspect of Indian Muslim life that has not been subject to discrimination or derision. The Indian state, an Indian press commonly engaging in sensationalism, and many ordinary Indians too contribute to this dismal situation.

Innovatively responding to India’s majoritarian maelstrom, Dutta does not plea for more multiculturalism, more religious freedom, or other traditional liberal salves for political and social wretchedness.

Sagnik Dutta’s new book In the Shadow of Minority Rights: Decolonising Gender, Liberalism and the Politics of Difference boldly engages with the tough realities of Indian Muslim life. Innovatively responding to India’s majoritarian maelstrom, Dutta does not plea for more multiculturalism, more religious freedom, or other traditional liberal salves for political and social wretchedness. By way of contrast, Dutta intervenes with a methodological entreaty urging scholarly analysis of Indian Muslims to move beyond “reified categories of minority rights, gender, liberalism and religion” (3). For Dutta, it is crucial for scholars to deploy ethnographic methods of social analysis to understand how law—including Islamic family law—actually functions in everyday life (3). For Dutta, decolonisation of both political theory and Muslim life in independent India is intimately related to method and is not simply “a project of critiquing the West or a form of nativism” (66). In this vein, traditional liberal conceptualisations of ‘minority rights’ are unhelpful for Dutta because they reproduce “dominant public discourses . . . that privilege presumed tensions between individual and community and reified conceptions of religion, liberalism and the state” (4). Importantly, these public discourses in India often deploy an “everyday . . . Islamophobia” (78) where “gender equality . . . becomes a stick to beat minority communities with” (81).

Dutta’s book is the latest contribution to a small but increasingly populated, robust, and interdisciplinary body of scholarship problematizing traditional understandings of how the state and non-state mutually relate using the everyday life of Indian Muslims as a touchstone for broader social and political analyses. Dutta adds to this body of scholarship in multiple ways but perhaps most conspicuously in their simultaneously decolonial and methodological aims, their focus on Muslims in the western city of Mumbai rather than northern Indian locales, and also their detailed examination of shariat courts operated in Mumbai by the increasingly influential Bharatiya Muslim Mahalia Andolan (BMMA, or Indian Muslim Women’s Movement) especially as contentious debates have recently roiled India concerning the criminalization of a common method of Muslim divorce.

Given my own research interests, I was particularly drawn to Chapter 5 of Dutta’s book, entitled “Between the home and the world: The many publics of Muslim law.” This chapter temporally opens in the midst of yet another vehement debate in Indian society and law about Muslim divorce and the prospective criminalization of ‘triple talaq’—a common form of Muslim divorce popularly tied to the allegedly rash behavior of Muslim men. The society-wide interest in the legal regulation of Muslim families in India belies typical characterizations of the bodies of statutory and caselaw doing this regulation as ‘Muslim personal law.’ In the same vein, Dutta’s chapter artfully complicates the public versus private nature of the shariat courts run by the BMMA highlighting the affect-saturated stage these courts provide for assembled audiences: “women and men would address the qazi [non-state judge] during the hearing. But at the same time, there was an expectation that the gathered audience . . . would understand and sympathise with their situation. . . . Not only were there no concerns about privacy, but there was an expectation that everyone present would participate in an unfolding narrative of sorrow and grief” (135). Similar ambiguous realities can also be found elsewhere in this chapter with, for example, the practice of triple talaq being excoriated by BMMA activists but also being covertly deployed by a female BMMA shariat court qazi trying to help a woman quickly exit an allegedly abusive marriage to her husband and availing all means possible to do so (145–47). Dutta also discusses here the referral of a divorce case by a BMMA shariat court to a dar ul qaza (non-state Muslim dispute resolution body) run by the male-dominated All India Muslim Personal Law Board—a frequent public sparring partner of the BMMA and its feminist Muslim goals (136).

The BMMA’s feminism notwithstanding, Dutta also brings attention in Chapter 5 to public characterizations of Muslim women—“poor helpless, crying women”—made by a key member of the BMMA following the 2017 Shayara Bano v. Union of India litigation where the Supreme Court of India took up the question of whether triple talaq would henceforth have any legal effect (150). Elsewhere in the book too, Dutta mentions a community training session conducted by the BMMA where an organizer expressed how “[a]s soon as [a Muslim woman] comes of age, she is married off and then she’s expected to reproduce 5–6 kids” (61). Many people working or researching in the arena of contemporary Indian politics will recognize how these characterizations of Muslim women captured by Dutta in their fieldwork have been used or abused by Hindu nationalists in India to justify discriminatory measures towards Muslims. These characterizations also have to be read, to my mind, alongside other worrisome Muslim feminist activities including arguably overly familiar networking with local police (see Chapter 3) and Dutta’s documentation of threats deployed by BMMA workers to seek the prosecution of at least some Muslim men by the Indian state for their pronouncement of triple talaq (117–19).

Dutta’s book encourages us to move away from technocratic liberal diagnoses of and remedies for the Indian Muslim situation as well as methodological overreliance on texts whether liberal or Islamic. 

By mentioning all of these BMMA and other Muslim feminist activities together here, I primarily intend to raise questions about how to comprehend the contemporary shape and strength of Muslim feminism in India and its relationship to state and state-allied power. By way of initial foray into this point, it is worth mentioning previous work of mine emphasizing that the Shayara Bano litigation represented the gaming of Muslim sectarianism by the Indian state (Redding 2021). The Muslim sects engaged with or manipulated by the Supreme Court of India in Shayara Bano included more ‘traditional’ Muslim sects such as the Ahl-e-Hadees, Hanafis, and Shias. But as I have also argued, this judicial manipulation recognized and relied on less famous locii of Muslim authority and power too—including what one might call ‘Muslim feminist sectarianism’ of which the BMMA is perhaps the leading voice. Indeed, as Dutta emphasizes from the outset of their book, for the BMMA “the principles of the Quranic text itself are considered infallible” so much so that this Quranic commitment “is a major bone of contention between the BMMA and other liberal feminist and secular women’s organisations” (51). Moreover, the BMMA’s jurisprudential views of what the Quran entails or demands are often (but not always) a riposte to more patriarchal articulations of the same. Indeed, Dutta also emphasizes how “[t]he mandate of reconstituting religious authority in [Muslim] community spaces is an important aim of the BMMA” (53). Thus what Dutta’s book confirms for me is that feminist Muslims should now broadly be considered one powerful sectarian grouping within Indian Islam.

As the Shayara Bano litigation is witness to, having the status of a recognizable sect can clearly be a source of strength. But the same litigation also draws attention to the potential perils of state-allied feminism or what Janet Halley might refer to as “governance feminism” (Halley 2006). In this regard, one of the awful ironies of a politics of hate—whether it be homophobia or Islamophobia—is that the objects of this hate often internalize their derision by others and then use the state to perpetrate this hate against parts of their community in turn. This was evident in recent family law politics in the United States where, in various legal arguments, gay marriage advocates derided as pathetic queer attempts to forge legal alternatives to the legal status of being married. For such marriage partisans, the word ‘marriage’ and the status of being married by the state were mythical. This was so much so that these partisans considered any other legal status (for example, domestic partnership) to be the endorsement of a long-repudiated politics of ‘separate but equal’ rather than something ‘different and better’ than majoritarian marriage. 

As Dutta’s book shows too, some feminist Muslims in India have similarly endorsed Indian state characterizations of Muslim women as abject in the face of Muslim male aggression or capriciousness. As I have written of earlier, the Indian state not only hates Indian Muslim but also loves them too. Moreover, this simultaneous hate and love represents an underlying dependency such that the Indian state’s relationship with Indian Muslims is best summarized as “I hate you; I love you; I need you!” (Redding 2020). In allying itself with and replicating the Indian state’s hateful rhetoric regarding Islam, minority feminism’s need for solidarity with other segments of Muslim thought and society similarly emerges. Indeed, the heterosexuality of Muslim marriage and Muslim feminists’ simultaneous love and hatred of Muslim men reveals an underlying feminist need that needs to be thoughtfully reckoned with. Crucially, Dutta’s book helps us with this reckoning by encouraging us to move away from technocratic liberal diagnoses of and remedies for the Indian Muslim situation as well as methodological overreliance on texts whether liberal or Islamic. 

References

Halley, Janet. Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 2006. 

Redding, Jeffrey A. “A Secular Failure: Sectarianism and Communalism in Shayara Bano v. Union of India.” Asian Journal of Law and Society 8, no. 1 (2021): 56–71.

———. A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India. Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2020.

Shayara Bano v. Union of India, AIR 2017 SC 4609.