The South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), 2025
From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amen... more From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The Act provides a path to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims. Amid countrywide protests emerged a unique political experience spearheaded by Muslim women: Shaheen Bagh. This article focuses on a protest site in the southern Indian city of Chennai to examine the everyday practices of domestic and ritual life that Muslim women brought to such spaces. It argues that such moments, though seemingly apolitical, also express political and moral will. By contextualizing these protests within a longer history of dissent in the state of Tamil Nadu, this article shows how Chennai Shaheen Bagh lies at the intersection of region and nation, union and federal government. When protesters declare that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the state’s demands to prove one’s citizenship via documents. Although the protests were about a citizenship law, Muslim women were in fact pointing to various modes of belonging that cannot be captured by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.
The South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ), 2025
From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amen... more From December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The Act provides a path to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims. Amid countrywide protests emerged a unique political experience spearheaded by Muslim women: Shaheen Bagh. This article focuses on a protest site in the southern Indian city of Chennai to examine the everyday practices of domestic and ritual life that Muslim women brought to such spaces. It argues that such moments, though seemingly apolitical, also express political and moral will. By contextualizing these protests within a longer history of dissent in the state of Tamil Nadu, this article shows how Chennai Shaheen Bagh lies at the intersection of region and nation, union and federal government. When protesters declare that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the state’s demands to prove one’s citizenship via documents. Although the protests were about a citizenship law, Muslim women were in fact pointing to various modes of belonging that cannot be captured by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.
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Papers by Harini Kumar