Cast(e) Away: Conversion and Recognition in Pasmanda Muslim Politics (1947-2009)

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with leading political and social actors of the Pasmanda Muslim movement in Uttar Pradesh, this lecture, given by Sanober Umar, seeks to complicate how categories of caste and religion in non-Hindu contexts are registered in mainstream politics and jurisprudence. An examination of the institutional and normative production of caste by the Indian State following the Partition, alongside systematic persecution of Pasmanda Muslims illustrates the multifaceted ways in which caste is perceived and remembered among Indian Muslims in the region. While the legacy of caste persists among urban Muslims, attempts to situate caste practices amongst Muslims as congruent to Hindu conceptions fail to account for how class and the religious racialization of Muslim minorities has impacted the histories and ongoing politics of “Indian Muslim” and indeed, Pasmanda Muslim identity. As such, the lecture calls for destabilizing categories of caste and religion and the various sites through which they converge and diverge in the politics of recognition and mobility, underscoring the relevance of racialization studies in understanding mechanisms that produce the polemical and homogenous figure of the Muslim in regional and national politics.

Speaker:

Dr. Sanober Umar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. Dr. Umar's current work explores the relationship (and critical distinctions) between caste and racial hierarchies, and how these entanglements-along with gender and class dynamics-inform the figure of the Muslim in Indian and global politics.

Moderated by Ali Usman Qasmi, External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center

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