We welcome papers for our ECSAS panel on Muslim Counterpublics in the Indian Nation-state Public Sphere which will bring together emerging and advanced scholars of Muslim identity in South Asia in the context of the nation-state public sphere. We wish to explore the deep history and contemporary imaginings of Muslimness from the vantage point of songs, music and sound, literary studies, history, anthropology, dastangoi, oral historiography, and cinema. We aim to shed light on the multiperspectival and pan-national Muslim identification process as it also intersects with ideas of ideological homogenisation, modernity, and religious revivalism. We wish to foreground Muslim lived-experience narratives across disciplines to discuss the Muslim in South Asia as a category of practicing, subverting and reclaiming agency. Our panel is also envisioned as a growing space for registering, archiving and centralizing Muslim voices. This is at a time of immense precarity affecting a community which not only suffers from internal fragmentation but is also in dire need of a unified, coherent and all-inclusive political consciousness. Proposed papers in our panel will thus explore junctures, events, overlaps, and nodes, situated across time and space, which act as vestibules between the idea of "Muslimness" and its various unfurlings in the public and counterpublic sphere. Therefore proposed papers in this panel will explore linkages of Muslim identification with religiosity, class, caste, gender, hegemonies, place making, pioneership, and rootedness. The aim is to move beyond problematizing authority, representation and mis-representation to invest in narratives which are first-person, self-reflexive, agency specific and advance critical foresight.
Link to the panel: https://ecsas2025.com/panel/124-muslim-counterpublics-in-the-indian-nation-state-public-sphere/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGTb69leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHYAIfTqbPTpxY8_GfTv_ftcjU-Wf_pbHFM9fWPZM757ZHwyWCp65vKY9Ew_aem_0D1vloZdU0bUEDt_TeCLSg