Kitab vs. Hijab: Muslim Girls Re-Generating Politics in India

This chapter looks at the recent hijab ban in the government funded collages of the south Indian state of Karnataka, through the lens of the Muslim girls’ voices mediated by a purposive section of mainstream news outlets. This research presents Muslim girls’ narrative responses to the impossible kitab (books) v. hijab (veil) ‘choice’ or the ‘choice’ between right to education and right to religion presented to them. The narratives outlined in this paper do not fit conventional understandings of ‘being’ political or ‘doing’ politics that rest largely on certain types of ‘actions’ seen as resistive and/or related to formal political institutions. Instead, these narratives are situated in a continuum of a new form of political protest and agency among young Muslim women in India following the larger nation-wide women-led protests the Citizenship Amendment Act (2020). Muslim girls’ voices in this research suggest their attempts to regenerate democracy by offering an alternative political vision of India (and being Indian) to the authoritarian vision currently in power. Situated at the intersection of scholarly areas such as youth studies, girlhood studies, and gender studies this paper suggest that to understand Muslim girls’ political agency in authoritarian and Hindu majoritarian India there is a need to recalibrate our understanding of politics and political agency. This has ramifications for understanding the women and girls’ political agency and actions specifically in the oppressive authoritarian contexts