Inside a Residential Girls' Madrasa in India

Bibliographic Data

ID2228331
AuthorsHem Borker (0000-0002-6588-6848, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume62
Issue3
Pages363-372
Publication date2021-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/714346
OpenAlexW3153855232
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited15

This essay explores everyday life inside girls' madrasas. Through a series of images gathered over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a residential girls' madrasa in Delhi and visits to several others across North India, I describe how young girls experience education in the madrasa. I argue that the ideal of a perfect Muslim woman (kamil momina) that students learn and embody differs from the one that the madrasa seeks to cultivate. At one level, the girls value and adopt many teachings of the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal) based on religious knowledge. At another level, they exercise a more pragmatic approach to cultivating their identity as young Muslim girls, using the legitimacy conferred on them by madrasa education to redefine social expectations around marriage, education, and employment

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnography · Everyday life · Ideal (ethics · Identity (music · Islam · Legitimacy · Piety · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Cambodian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare

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