This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

This chapter provides an insight into girls’ lives beyond the madrasa by focusing on the transition made by some madrasa students from girls’ madrasas to higher education in Universities that recognize madrasa degrees.

Drawing on months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the rising salience of girls’ madrasas in India and the feminisation of madrasa enrolments. It argues that rather than the rhetoric of religious conservatism that is conventionally applied to the choice of madrasa education, a range of intersecting factors shape the educational choices of Muslim parents. Employing narratives from the field, it illustrates how the increasing demand for girls’ education emanating from within Muslim communities interacts with larger structural factors, socio-cultural concerns, economic considerations, gender norms and anxieties, leading parents to opt for madrasa education for their daughters.

This chapter presents a series of ethnographic portraits. Each of the portraits embody, manifest, and to some degree comment on the different faces of women’s engagement with girls’ madrasas against the backdrop of India’s changing social religious and educational landscape.

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