Studies in Religion and the Everyday

Farhana Ibrahim is Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. A social anthropologist, her research interests include the study of borders, policing, migration, and ethnographic perspectives on the state. With a PhD from Cornell University, her ethnographic research, spanning almost two decades, centres on the western Indian region of Kutch. Her first book, Settlers, Saints, and Sovereigns: An Ethnography of State Formation in Western India (Routledge, 2009) focuses on Muslim pastoral communities in Gujarat along the Kutch-Sindh border. Her second book, From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an ethnography of policing, civil-military relations, kinship, and surveillance on a South Asian borderland. She has also co-edited South Asian Borderlands: Mobility, History, Affect (with Tanuja Kothiyal; Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Farhana Ibrahim: Introduction
Section I: Capital, Urban Development, and Social Histories of the City
1: Malavika Kasturi: Maths, Quotidian Conflicts, and Urban Property: Perspectives from Colonial Legal Archives in Banaras
2: Usha Rao: Walking with the Gods: Re-making Ooru in a Global City
3: Shankar Ramaswami: Abhimanyus in Exile: Entanglements and Bonds Among Migrant Workers in Delhi
Section II: Secularization, Democratization, and Community
4: Moyukh Chatterjee: "What Kind of Hindu Are You?" Muscular Hinduism and the Making of Majorities and Minorities
5: Benu Verma: Bovine Sifters: Cows, Indigeneity, and Environmentalism Among an Urban Middle-Class Guru Following
6: Khalid Anis Ansari: "Like a Sackcloth Patch on Muslin": The Anti-Caste Pasmanda Narration of the Muslim Social
7: Michel Boivin and Trisha Lalchandani: Everyday Religiosity among the Hindu Sindhis of India: Sindhi Identity and the Religious Market in the Era of Social Networks
Section III: Markets, Materiality, and Social Reproduction Through Labour, Work, and Employment
8: Chandan Bose: Devi or Art History? Reading Entangled Narratives on the Lineage of Artisanal Skill from Telangana
9: Girish Bahal, Ujaan Chandra, Sriya Iyer, and Anand Shrivastava: Religion and Employment in India
10: Madhulika Sonkar: Taleem, Hunar, Tarbiyat: Meanings of Education and Vocation for Muslim Women in Old Delhi
11: Renny Thomas: Religion, Religious, and Beliefs: The Life of Religion in an Indian Scientific Research Institute
Section IV: Boundaries and Thresholds, Sacred and Secular Sovereignties
12: Tanuja Kothiyal: Crafty Devis of the Thar: Refashioning Charani Sagatis in the Indo-Pak Borderlands
13: Malvika Sharma: Sounds of Religion or Sonic Disorder? Religion and Everyday Life in the Borderland of District Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir
14: Aparna Balachandran: The Sounds of Everyday Christianity: Listening to the Protestant Mission in 19th Century Madras