2025 Theses Doctoral

The Work of Religion: Violence, Trauma and Refusal in the Lives of Muslims in Hindu India

Mehdi, Zehra

The Work of Religion: Violence, Trauma and Refusal in the Lives of Muslims in Hindu India is the first ethnography of Muslim persecution that delineates the psychological imprints of Hindu nationalism on Muslims. Drawing on two years (2019-2021) of ethnographic interviews and participant observation with Muslims in Old Lucknow (North India, Uttar Pradesh), the dissertation explains how religion becomes a psychological repository comprising formulations of faith, arguments of belief, interfaith theological vocabularies, gendered embodiment, ethical comportment, and readings of the Quran through which persecution is articulated, worked through, and refused.

Extending the psychoanalytic definition of work as a psychic process of meaning making, I submit that the ‘work of religion’ is the psycho-political process by which Muslims meaningfully use religion to make sense of their victimization under the banality of state violence and transform their personal suffering into acts of refusal. The dissertation demonstrates that instead of being passive victims caught in the vortex of intersectional suffering, Muslims differentiated across caste, class, gender and sect make meaning of their predicament, suture their emotional wounds, and curate their modes of protest by deploying the rich and discursive tradition of Islam in north India.

For Muslims under an oppressive regime that pervasively dehumanizes them as enemies of the nation, the ‘work of religion’ emerges as the means through which they stay psychically alive and politically active.Political and academic discourses on religious persecution uphold liberal secularism as a bulwark against the rampant and escalating anti-Muslim violence of the Hindu nationalist regime. Arguing against the vicious othering of Muslims, scholars tenaciously index Muslims as secular nationalists and steer cautiously away from acknowledging the ethical persuasions that shape Muslim lives.

Offering a necessary bridge between pious practice and political articulation, The Work of Religion shifts the focus from the liberatory potential of Indian secularism to the praxis of religion, highlighting the variegated ways that pious Muslims use religion as a crucial resource to manage their traumatic tribulations under prolonged political duress. Focusing on experiences of anti-Muslim state violence, dissertation redirects the anthropological emphasis from political actors of Hindu nationalism to its permanent adversaries, tracing a subaltern narrative of Muslim survival. The Work of Religion foregrounds religious and psychoanalytic epistemologies of persecution and resistance presenting a new framework of religion as a crucial resource of psychological sustenance.