Muslimness, Feminism, and the Constitution | SLR Interviews Dr Sagnik Dutta

SLR recently interviewed Sagnik Dutta, a scholar whose work areas span political theory, critical socio-legal studies, and approaches to technology. In particular, they have published extensively on the intersections of religion, nationalism, and gender. Professor Dutta is currently a researcher at the Digital South Research Lab, Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Associate Professor (on leave) at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University. Apart from their academic experience, they have also been a journalist and conducted field studies and research for various articles. They hold a Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies  from the University of Cambridge, and a Master’s degree in South Asian Area Studies from SOAS, University of London.

Our editors, Matilde Ribeiro and Sushmita Nelson, sat down with Professor Dutta to discuss their first book, In the Shadow of Minority Rights (Cambridge University Press 2025), which explores how India’s Muslim minority community negotiates the interaction between interventionist laws and changing religious mores, in the face of rising religious majoritarianism and persecution. Focusing on questions of gender and the lives of Muslim women, it examines how these questions play out in the community-led dispute resolution spaces of Sharia Adalats, where marital disputes are raised along with broader questions of equality (barabari) and justice (insaf), and how to shape the law and the community in a way that accounts for these ideals. The book is an ethnography of Muslim women’s negotiation with rights, conceptualisation of the self in relation to the law, and interpretation of Quranic values, which is intended to challenge and contribute to global discourses around minority rights.

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Professor Dutta, thank you very much for joining us today! We are really excited to discuss your new monograph on our Forum.  At the outset, we wanted to begin the conversation by enquiring into the question of positionality. As an ‘outsider’ to the Muslim communities and spaces in Mumbai you have engaged with in the book, how did your own positionality impact your ethnographic work? In particular, how did modalities of trust play out, given the broader political climate and distrust between communities?

When we think about positionality, we always presume the social location of the researcher. But I should mention at this point that I worked as a journalist for many years, and I brought to bear that knowledge and insight upon my research. This was how I got to know some of my interlocutors and informants through a shared history of intellectual investment, so to speak, in certain issues. That was, for example, how I met Zakia Soman, who is one of the founders of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (‘BMMA’). I was working as a journalist with Frontline then and writing an article on women’s interventions and activism for reforming personal laws. As a journalist, as someone interested in questions of the relationship between religion and personal laws, and also a gender nonbinary person, I got drawn into issues of religion, gender and the law, and this influenced my positionality and relationship to the field.

It was through this shared intellectual investment, and my ethnographic immersion in the world of these interlocutors, that I was able to build trust with my interlocutors. For this work, you must immerse yourself in the field and you must approach the field with a certain kind of intellectual humility. When I first came in touch with Zakia, before I started my doctoral work, one of our early discussions was about how fascinated I was as a scholar and researcher by the work she did in bringing religion and constitutionalism into conversation, and how I wanted to know more about how this played out on the ground. And she was very welcoming, and that is how the journey began — I approached the field, like I said, with a certain amount of humility and curiosity to learn about the lives of people who were different from me.

I started my research between 2017 and 2018, when I was conducting field work in Mumbai; I met Noorjehan Safia Niyaz, who is also one of the founders of the BMMA and asked her how I could be useful to the movement. I ended up working as an intern in the organisation’s Mumbai office for almost a year, taking notes of cases, doing a lot of the data entry work, and helping out women in those forums to fill out their forms, especially women who were not literate and so on. Therefore, these are the ways in which I inserted myself in the everyday functioning of the women's Sharia court and the institution as a whole and built trust by offering ways in which I could be helpful to my interlocutors. Further, we have a presumption as to who is an outsider and who is an insider in a public space, where it is often men who are more vocal about their experiences of violence. However, the space in which I was working was not a public space but an enabling community space, built around the gendered nature of these women’s experiences. This allows women a kind of openness they cannot find elsewhere, and trust arises from the fact that the people there were interested in hearing their stories.

One thing I find particularly interesting is how you use your journalist’s perspective, and the curiosity and intellectual humility you describe, to explain root causes, and how things have come to be the way they are. I was curious about the roots of how Muslim-majority neighbourhoods become a site of Muslim women’s resistance? Does this arise because of spatial exclusion through overcrowding and isolation, prompting disaffection and resistance? Or do such neighbourhoods become fertile grounds for such resistance since women are relatively less constrained by majoritarianism and forms of religious patriarchy in these more religiously homogeneous spaces?

When I approached the field, these were not questions I was initially asking, because I did not know about the history or so much of how these places came to be. But as I got to know my interlocutors better and got to know more about their journey, I realised that the history of the Mumbai riots and the targeted violence against the minorities played an important role in the shaping of these particular neighbourhoods as Muslim-majority neighbourhoods, and in the processes of ghettoisation.

What was particularly salient in this was the way in which women were catapulted, as it were, to public spaces. In these moments, women who were mostly homemakers, or who did not have a lot of exposure to public space, suddenly had their lives changed— during riots they had to go to the police station, when the police conducted raids and picked up men from the neighbourhood, women had to organise some form of resistance. Suraiya Sheikh, one of my interlocutors and a really powerful activist, articulated that it was in that very moment when they started organising that there was some sort of awareness and self-consciousness born about how they could get together and collectively organise and fight injustice. That was the trigger, and a key factor that allowed women to collectively come together and challenge various forms of injustice.

A special aspect was how a lot of these sites of activism actually emerged from women’s homes, which continues to this day with the organisation of mahila mandals or spaces for alternative dispute resolution and adjudication of disputes. The space of the home itself underwent transformation, and because of women’s role in public spaces, they started questioning the injustice they saw in their homes. With this activism, they realised the potential they had within themselves to actually get together, collectively organise and fight against injustice, and that is when a lot of the Muslim women's grassroots organisations came into being through the 1990s.

To answer the second part of your question, as to whether they are less constrained by majoritarianism and some forms of religious patriarchy, this is a little complex. They are not entirely insulated from majoritarianism because of the ways in which the excesses of the majoritarian state affect grassroots communities, even in terms of discriminatory access to public facilities, access to legal aid, or police apathy. These are things that women encounter on an everyday basis, and therefore I would not say that they are less constrained by the majoritarian state. But they do have a tortuous push-and-pull relationship with the majoritarian state, in which on the one hand there is a layer of everyday familiarity and conversations, but on the other hand, there is a fair bit of antagonism.

When it comes to religious patriarchy, I have traced the antagonism faced by these women at an organisational and institutional level, with organisations like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, other male qazis (a judge of the Sharia Court), and so on. But there are many male adjudicators who are sympathetic to the causes of these women's groups, and with whom these women's groups have a relationship that I would not call amicable, but an everyday working relationship where both sides are trying to work together.

Thus, in both these cases, there is a tortuous and push-and-pull relationship with the majoritarian state as well as with religious patriarchy, where there are points of tension and antagonism, but also on the everyday level, there exist working relationships that can benefit women’s resistance.

That is very interesting, particularly the idea of the home itself as a changing space, which is dissolving the public-private binary that patriarchy engenders. Would you say that these spaces, like homes in Muslim neighbourhoods or the community spaces you spoke of earlier, have the potential to become subaltern counterpublics/feminist landscapes of their own, or is there a danger of them falling prey to the state’s perceptions of them as being ‘regressive’ and ‘patriarchal’? What is the trajectory you see for these institutions?

I found that to be a very interesting and intriguing question, especially because you evoke the concept of subaltern counterpublics, which is, of course, Nancy Fraser’s challenge to the Habermasian idea of the public sphere, and one that highlights the role of subaltern marginalised communities in challenging hegemonies of how the public sphere functions or is constituted. These counter-publics articulate alternative ways of thinking and being in the public sphere, but at the same time, not all subaltern counterpublics are necessarily egalitarian or conducive to feminist goals as broadly understood.

We have to be a bit careful about characterising these spaces and these movements as subaltern counterpublics because they are not entirely outside the pale of the hegemonic discourses of the state regarding the family and the minority community. I try to highlight in the fourth and fifth chapters of the book that ultimately, in these spaces, there is a certain kind of understanding of what Muslim family law is or what the Muslim minority identity is, and how that identity needs to be reformed, and so on. But this is not entirely divorced from the state, the state’s understanding of the family, and how the family or religion need to be regulated.

There is a common opposition in discourse between the state’s uniform laws, which are seen as secular and progressive, and community spaces, which are seen as standing for regressive laws. Since both are ultimately patriarchal spaces, this kind of binary isa little wrongheaded. It is more important to understand the overlaps between the gendered logics of the state and the gendered logics of these spaces, especially as women are trying to break away from both, such as by challenging the heteronormative family and forging new kinds of kinship roles. While there are breaks between religious patriarchy and the state’s hegemonic logic in thinking about community and the family, there are important overlaps, one of them being this idea that the family, as understood in very heteronormative terms, is the fundamental unit of religion, society, and state regulation.

There are parallels between the anti-Muslim violence in the 1990s (Chapter 3) and the current-day Bulldozer Raj in the manner in which they displace Muslims and restrict them to communal ghettos. How do you view the changing role of Muslim women over the years within these spaces, in the face of relentless state action against their community?

I think the major difference today is the higher visibility of Muslim women and their activism in public spaces, which we saw in the context of the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which was again primarily organised by women, who played very important roles in the mobilisation and were quite visible in public places during the protests.

I think one change that has arisen in the 2000s is a concerted kind of Muslim women's activism that is becoming quite prominent in the public sphere, based on self-conscious identification as Muslim women’s organisations, and staging their religious identity in the public sphere. This is particularly significant to my mind, because if one looks at Indian women’s movements, there was definitely a certain discomfort with religion and religious identity. However,  Muslim women’s movements like the Bharati Muslim Mahila Andolan or the All India Muslim Women's Personal Law Board have eschewed the same in favour of being forthright about their Muslimness. This challenges religious patriarchy, as well as majoritarian attempts to erase the importance of a Muslim identity.

I am also intrigued by how they invoke the Constitution, ideas of citizenship, and so on, in ways that do not differentiate between their religious identity and their identity as rights-bearing citizens. On the contrary, these are portrayed as complementary aspects of their identity. While I have not specifically been following responses to the Bulldozer Raj, I feel that a key part of the trajectory of these organisations has been this more self-conscious declaration or assertion of Muslimness in public spaces, while laying claim to citizenship rights and identity.

The implicit theme of a Hindu majoritarian state’s initiatives for Muslim women frequently centres around ‘rescuing’ them from their ‘oppressive environments.’ Yet, in your work, we see Muslim women demonstrating their agency and transcending gender barriers to help their communities, such as Chapter 3’s example of them helping riot victims. Would community-oriented reforms led by women fare better than state policies themselves?

There is a global discourse, which of course gained ascendance post 9/11, around saving the Muslim woman, who is imagined as a repository of Muslim culture and yet in need of being saved from Islam. The laws framed in the Indian context, like the banning of triple talaq under The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act of 2019, often see such protectionist logic being replicated by the right-wing government.

At the same time, while this logic of community-led reforms is often discussed in conversations on family law and so on, we have to be careful about how we define the community, because there is no pristine notion of it that is divorced from the state. The community itself is a statist formulation, which goes back to how the colonial state enumerated people in terms of their communities, codifying laws and categorising identities. Even the logic of community-versus-state is part of Western European multiculturalism, which I feel is sometimes wrongly applied to the Indian context; we have to also parse the category of the community itself as not necessarily given.

Having said that, community-led reform is slightly problematic because it creates the category of the community as separate from the state. The focus should instead be on the tools that are most useful for empowering women in their social location and context. There are laws that apply across all communities, for example the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005 or the claims for maintenance under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (presently Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023), all of which are instruments that are legally available to all women, but harder for some women to access. It should be a question of enabling communities, not in the exclusionary sense of community, but in the spirit of figuring out what are the particular obstacles faced by women in particular communities — are they, for example, facing difficulties in filing a police complaint because they are from a particular community?

When we look at the other question of which practices of a community should and need not be brought under the ambit of state rule, this needs to be viewed through the lens of whether or not such an action would be instrumental to the empowerment of Muslim women.

When you look at these alternative dispute resolution forums like the Sharia Adalat, they do help women who do not have the wherewithal to approach the formal legal systems. Abolishing these forums as supposedly regressive is not just incorrect, but ill-informed, and does not take into account how the law works on the ground — it is not easy for women to even find a lawyer, afford their fees, or access the formal legal system. If a woman is stuck in a bad marriage and wants a mutual consent divorce, if she can get a favourable verdict in an alternative dispute forum, instead of spending months and years in a family court, should not the state be allowing these different sites of law to co-exist?

But there is a flip side to that: if an alternative dispute resolution forum advocates for domestic violence, then obviously that is not something that can be condoned, as there are some fundamental laws that should not be violated by any forum. That is where the state has to decide where it comes in and where it can allow grassroots organisations and institutions (a term I prefer as opposed to community-led ones) to flourish. It should decide where to draw the boundary between the state and these institutions, which function in similar spaces but lack the state’s own authority.

In Chapter 5, you describe the Sharia Adalat as a site of alternative dispute resolution. We found the contestations over the fragility of the idea of a Muslim community, and everyday litigation for rights particularly interesting. Could you tell us more about how such community organisations mediate relationships with the state (if at all), especially in light of the Muslim community’s frequent criminalisation?

Absolutely. I must at the very outset mention that these organisations exist at the intersection of state and non-state actors and they mediate between them in various ways. Building upon my previous comment on how the ‘community’ is not some pristine entity outside the field of the state, what I would like to say is that these organisations have very close ties with the organs of the state at a grassroots level - like the local police station, for instance. This is a strange relationship of some sort of everyday familiarity. But there are tensions between these two entities as well. For instance, there are activists who would regularly visit a police station - this is a way to build intimacy with the state's organs, [in this case] the police, because they do play a very important role in giving some teeth to these alternative dispute resolution forums. For example, if a husband who has divorced his wife or who is not paying maintenance, and then the wife files a complaint in such an organisation, but the husband refuses to show up. In this scenario, activists would then approach the police to kind of coerce the husband into coming and into engaging with these processes.

The activists thus have close links with the police on the ground to enforce state processes, so to speak. However, at the same time, there are points of tension between the police and the activists, such as when the police refuse to take action, or when the police shame women. These are some instances which I describe in my book. There is one particular instance that I remember very vividly. One of the activists kept going to the police station and pleading with the police officer who was on duty to register a woman's complaint, and we went to the same police station a couple of times. On one occasion however, the qazi presiding over the women's Sharia court, who was a slightly senior activist, went to the police station and even confronted the woman police officers, and said things like 'you know this is not right, you have to take action when a complaint is being filed for violence or domestic violence or whatever the concern might be', etc.  These are symbolic moments when women are also asserting their rights as citizens, and they often do this through ties with various civil society organisations like the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. These organisations help them with tools to negotiate with police officers and the state, often introducing to these activists concepts like Zero FIR, giving them answers for when the police refuse to register a case, or when a case is not within their jurisdiction, or when police violence occurs.  This again shows us how there is this constant interaction with the state, but also attempts to, I would say, learn about the nuts and bolts of how the state machinery works.

The debates about the criminalisation of triple talaq in the public sphere do seep into the everyday functioning of the Sharia court because women were often talking about the triple talaq bill, prior to its enactment into law in 2019, as something that was an impending disaster, and women judges or adjudicators often used that as a stick to warn men with, saying, 'oh you know, this bill is going to come into place and you better be careful that you can't just pronounce talaq at your whim.’ So there is a shadow, if I may call it that, of the carceral state that looms large over some of these organisations and institutions where state power exists in more shadowy, less apparent forms. These forms are often used to enforce the writ of these organisations. So that is how the question of criminality is negotiated, I would say.

The role of a female qazi in Sharia Adalat courts acknowledges the intersectional reality of Muslim women being both Muslim and women. Moreover, you have described in Chapter 2 how Suraiya Shaikh, a female qazi, frequently invoked the spiritual equality of men and women and critiqued the larger patriarchal status quo. Is this a symbol of a larger Muslim feminist consciousness at work, one shaped by religion as well as the law? Or is it more of a form of everyday resistance against the larger patriarchy, both Hindu and Muslim?

I would say that it is a bit of both, because the movement I was studying was definitely part of a larger global Islamic feminist movement with waves of activism in the United States, Southeast Asia, and parts of the Middle East, which talk about feminist interpretations of the Quran and reading it from women’s perspectives, to establish the spiritual equality between men and women. That intellectual universe is definitely part of these spaces, but there needs to be a distinction between the activists who are more explicitly part of these movements — many of whom are English-educated, well-travelled and inserted in these global currents of Islamic feminism — and working-class activists like Suraiya Sheikh, who only come to know about these discourses through interactions with someone like Noorjehan. There are interactions happening between different classes of activists, which is how the discourse of Islamic feminism circulates, but at the same time there are common lived experiences of marginalisation as Muslims and as women. While global discourses, mediated by the activism of people like Noorjehan and Asghar Ali Engineer, have inspired some of these groups, so too do ghettoisation and the politicisation of Muslim identity, which make it important for these activists to assert their identity. Local experiences of discrimination and marginalisation come into play, and religion and religious identity become ways to counter those. 

Minority rights discourse has often been criticised even by its supporters for siloing off other aspects of minority identity, such as in this case, caste identity among Muslims in India. Simultaneously, Hindu and Brahminical nationalism have led to new, albeit shaky solidarities being formed between Muslim and Bahujan communities as the groups most immediately affected. To what extent did you see these two phenomena operate in your work, and how much of a role did caste play in the communities you studied?

That is a great question, but to be honest, I did not explore caste that much in my ethnography because my work really was focused on the law and Muslim family law and alternative dispute resolution forums within the context of the emergence of global Islamic reform and so on. It did not come up in conversations, as most women I spoke to would talk more about their Muslim identity than about caste. However, class played a key role, as a lot of the women I spoke to, particularly those who would visit the alternative dispute resolution forums in relation to their marital disputes were working either as domestic workers or in the informal sector, with many also working as beauticians or in parlours. To that extent, this was not an urban, English-educated middle-class clientele.

I could also see similarities in how religious minorities and caste minorities experience the state, as pointed out by many anti-caste activists; this was particularly evident in terms of the shared history of police violence against caste and religious minorities, experiences of ghettoisation, and the lack of access to basic amenities in slums. I would say that there are definite intersections and overlaps between the ways in which the state is experienced by caste and religious minorities. But beyond that, unfortunately, I did not find a lot to pin down the caste aspect in my ethnography.

Minority rights are, more so now than ever, a lightning rod for politics globally. You have spoken about wanting to understand how global Islamic feminist reform had influenced your interlocutors, but did this global sense of impinging on minority rights in any way inform your writing of the book, or were you more inspired by the specific context of Indian Muslims? Are there things in your work that you feel need to be engaged with globally to better understand minorities’ rights, lives, and resistance?

My work is definitely grounded in India because ethnographic work is always contextual — there is no point in denying that. But at the same time, it is also inserted in global circuits of power and resistance, where global Islamic feminism plays a very important role in the shaping of these spaces and movements. Similarly, the kind of debates that we see in Indian politics are very similar to global politics about the framing of the Muslim woman as a victim in need of saving. I wanted to, in particular, push against the false bogey of the Sharia court, which Western liberal democracies portray as a horrible space where women are marginalised and subject to the worst excesses of a tyrannical religion.

There is a long tradition of writing against this post-9/11 framing of Islam as a threat, by scholars who I had been reading for a long time — such as Saba Mahmood, whose Politics of Piety (Princeton University Press 2011) inspired me to work on something to do with religion and gender for my PhD, and Lila abu-Lughod. Therefore, there is a whole tradition of anthropology and political theory writing which challenges this idea of framing Muslim women as victims, and also tracing the larger politics, as it were, of painting women in these terms, which also has important implications for how we look at resistance.

I definitely hope that my work’s descriptions of activism also engage a global audience, because similar debates are playing out around the world with regard to Islamophobia and perceptions of Muslim women. I hope that the stories I am trying to tell in the book create a space for thinking about emancipation and liberation that moves away from stereotypes to consider how Muslim women think about and enact their own resistance.

Another aspect which we found to be of particular note in your book is its conscious effort to humanise your subjects. Given how ideologically and politically charged these debates are, it is a refreshing counter to focus on the subjectivities of the people you are talking about, who have often been seen as stereotypes or blank slates for projection of external concerns. I found that intervention itself so important. With that, we are at the end of the questions we planned for this interview, but is there anything else you would like to add on about the themes we covered?

I wanted to highlight my methodology of bringing socio-legal methods into an analysis of political theory, which is a challenge to the textual focus of most conventional ways in which we ‘do’ political theory. The ethnographic site is also important for thinking about key concepts in political theory, such as in my book, the concept of the minority. So to that extent, that was a very conscious intervention, a new way of doing political theory that unfortunately is still marginal to the discipline. Decolonising political theory, and especially the concept of minority rights, requires us to think about how we are doing political theory in the first place, and how we can treat the lived experiences of the subjects of this theory so that they can speak back and be heard in the normative debates that theory engenders.

To go back to one of your questions, about the community and the individual, this is a classic debate in liberal multiculturalism — how do we balance rights between the community and the individual? Especially when gender comes into play, community is usually construed as being in opposition to the individual, but my book shows that these debates oversimplify contexts such as this, because for a lot of these women, their fights are not against their community. Their fights are about reclaiming certain kinds of identity, which includes firstly, a recognition of their “Muslimness,” and secondly, a recovery and reclaiming of what it means to be a Muslim and what it means to be a citizen. This in turn makes us fundamentally question dichotomies of religion/constitutionalism, secularism/religion, etc., within which political theory usually works. I would say that these would be my concluding thoughts. Thank you.