Inside a Residential Girls’ Madrasa in India

Borker, Hem

doi:10.1086/714346

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…I argue in my work (Borker, 2018) that assessing madrasa education for girls only within the frameworks of reproduction or empowerment tends to obfuscate the tensions and paradoxes that characterise everyday life in modern times. Attention to the everyday experiences of students inside madrasas (Borker, 2021) allows us to understand how girls negotiate the multiple constraints posed by gatekeepers (such as Ariba Shakeel), institutional rules and/or broader social structures. Through complex trajectories of rebellion, submission, piety, tactical maneuvering and everyday negotiations girls participate in redefining the educated Muslim woman (Borker, 2018).…”

Section: In Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘Housewife’ on an Education Mission: An Ethnographic Portrait

Borker

2023

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article employs the ethnographic portrait of the founder and co-owner of a chain of girls’ madrasas in a Muslim-dominated mofussil town in Uttar Pradesh to illuminate the current moment at which girls’ madrasas stand in a rapidly changing India. These madrasas use a range of imaginaries from the global ummah to the pious educated Indian Muslim woman to recast madrasa education. offering a mix of formalised religious education and modern schooling in safe ‘purdah’ institutions. The article illustrates how girls’ madrasas are both a source and result of the changing imagery of the kamil momina 1 or ideal Islamic woman in India. It teases out the connections between these various strands to illustrate larger social implications and argues that contemporary girls’ madrasas do not conform to the binaries of social reproduction and empowerment that have been conventionally applied to studies on madrasas.

show abstract

Section: In Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘Housewife’ on an Education Mission: An Ethnographic Portrait

Borker

2023

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Aspiring Inside a Girls Madrasa: Gender, Negotiation and Change

Borker

2023

Sociological Bulletin

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article draws on my ethnography of girls’ madrasas in India. It is woven around the ethnographic portrait of Zainab, 1 a rather reluctant madrasa student studying in a residential girls’ madrasa in Delhi who aspires to be a doctor. The article employs ethnographic portraiture to ‘focus in’ on Zainab’s educational journey and life in the madrasa, while also drawing attention to the larger canvas of intersecting forms of marginalisation, gender negotiations, and claim-making by Muslim women. It highlights how Muslim marginalisation intersects with gender disadvantage shaping everyday decisions about education, mobility and career choices. It argues that women’s negotiations and agency are nested in a larger context of marginalisation; while also co-constituting it. It examines Zainab’s life trajectory and aspirations to illustrate how education is a contradictory resource. At one level there is a synchrony between parents and madrasas on ideals of Islamic womanhood, but at another level, the piety project implemented by the madrasa does not represent the everyday experiences of madrasa students. The article argues that young women like Zainab, in attempting to balance madrasa prescriptions and their own aspirations, refashion gender norms through its inhabitation.

show abstract

Doing style for Saraswati Puja: Girlhood, Class, and Community Identity among Muslim girls in Assam

Goswami,

Bhuyan

2024

Ethnicities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning, is organised by youth clubs and educational institutions in eastern India. We draw on debates on girlhood, codes of respectable femininity in a neoliberal world, and how these play out for Muslim girls in the school context. These ideas frame our analysis of the dressing up practice among Muslim girls in a government school. We argue that the middle-class and ethnicised ideals of girlhood are amplified and reconfigured by the popular discourses on Saraswati Puja and add to the tensions over the appropriate code of dressing within the context of Puja at school. While the reality of girls’ lives is being shaped in novel ways, the Muslim girls engagement with the ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ through varied modes of ‘doing style’ put them under contrary pressures in public places like school. In such a scenario, their accounts of dressing up and participating in this event serve as a vantage point to understand how girlhood is being construed and experienced from varied positions of class, caste, age, and community. These accounts highlight Muslim girls’ engagement with the codes of femininity in the majoritarian cultural universe of a school.

show abstract

Inside a Residential Girls’ Madrasa in India

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

The ‘Housewife’ on an Education Mission: An Ethnographic Portrait

The ‘Housewife’ on an Education Mission: An Ethnographic Portrait

Aspiring Inside a Girls Madrasa: Gender, Negotiation and Change

Doing style for Saraswati Puja: Girlhood, Class, and Community Identity among Muslim girls in Assam

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About