Nomaan Hasan

NOMAAN HASAN, then a graduate student at Brown University, Providence, Rhod Island, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Encounters Between Secularism and Islam in Contemporary India,” supervised by Dr. Robert W. Preucel. This project investigated how marginalized communities seek to formulate collective selfhood in the context of intensifying majoritarianism in the country. Over twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the grantee conducted participant observation as well as with interviews with community activists, lawyers, religious leaders, and social workers on the strategies involved addressing the problem of minority representation in the midst of a historic crackdown on independent political activity in the country. Social work training workshops, planning meetings of civil society organizations, programs for public awareness, along with government offices such as the collectorate and police station formed the principal sites of this project. Particular attention was paid to how minority-marked subjects attempt to create a space for advancing their claims without bearing the burden of representing their difference. The project addresses current debates on the normative and pragmatic investment in difference as the basis of politics, and contributes to anthropological scholarship on identity, ethics, law, and religious freedom