New Neighbors, New Muslims: Gender, Class, and Community in Contemporary India

FAIN: FT-264985-19

Jennifer D. Ortegren
President and Fellows of Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT 05753-6004)

Research for an article, leading to a book manuscript, on relationships in India between Muslim and Hindu women.

This project examines how upwardly mobile Muslim families in and around Udaipur, Rajasthan, India—and especially Muslim women across generations—are reconfiguring their everyday and religious lives to form new middle class identities for themselves and their communities. In so doing, the project asks, how are they redefining not only understandings of modern Indian Islam, but relationships with their Hindu neighbors? This projects moves beyond narratives of marginalization and conflict that are often the focus of scholarship of Indian Muslims to analyze how definitions of gender, religion, and class are formulated anew in rapidly shifting and diverse—but peaceful—contexts in contemporary India, and to consider the future of Muslim-Hindu relations among the emerging middle classes.