The Research Office at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) is organising a Research Colloquium which will see a paper presentation by Dr. Shireen Azam, Postdoctoral Fellow at NLSIU on the topic, “Between True Mohammedan and True Caste: The Missing Muslim Lower Caste in Colonial India.”

• Day & date: Monday, May 11, 2026
• Time: 4:00 – 5.30 PM
• Venue: Conference Room, Training Centre, Ground Floor, NLSIU 

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that caste in Muslims provides a missing piece in the scholarly understanding of the reconstitution of caste and religious identities in Modern India. Caste in Muslim communities has attracted some scholarly attention in the last two decades (I Ahmed 2003, Alam 2003, Ansari 2018, A Ahmed 2023, Azam 2023, H Shah 2023). However, the evidence of caste in Muslims has not done much to inform the study of the category of the Muslim which is extremely potent in modern India – as a religious minority, and as Aamir Mufti (1995) famously articulated, the other against which the modern national self is constructed.

Why does caste remain conceptually anomalous in studying Muslims in the Indian subcontinent? This paper probes the sociological and anthropological construction of the category of the Muslim in colonial knowledge production and representative politics in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century India, through the lens of Muslim-caste. The empirical “revelation” of Muslims being caste subjects posed an epistemic threat to foundational assumptions about religion and race that structured the colonial-Brahminical knowledge order. This confoundment was resolved through the reiteration of epistemic cleavages that consolidated the categories of the “true Mahomedan”— the foreigner — and “true caste,” construed as Hindu. This has consequences for the commonsense that comes to structure the category of “the Muslim” as it emerges and participates in shaping the nation’s future in the twentieth century.