Paper short abstract:

Western imperialist and Indian majoritarian politics inspire aspirations for ethical reform among marginalised Bengali Muslims. I reflect on how these aspirations manifest in the idiom and practice of Islamic reformism and the consequences of this imagined alternative for liberal models of change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the complex combination of local and modern, political and religious elements in the ethical imagination of Muslims in rural West Bengal. Drawing on two years ethnographic fieldwork I stress that for this stigmatized group, Indian liberal modernity does not offer the equally distributed increase in wellbeing that was promised, but rather has materialized in exploitative capitalism and continued marginalization. My interlocutors link the sense of moral degradation to the influence of Western liberalism, which drives unbridled individualism, leading to social fragmentation and a decline of dharma, the local ethics of justice and order.

In this context, the Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is stepping into the sense of moral failure and exclusion experienced by Bengali Muslims, drawing on the idiom of all-encompassing dharma to incorporate local sociality, rationalized religious conviction, and modern civility. Disenfranchised from political voice, reformist Muslims aim for individual reform rather than collective mobilization, through techniques of the self (both religious practice and modern education) that promises liberation from the 'backward' past and modern personhood. Islamic Mission School are a hallmark of this imagined future.

TJ rejects Western imperialist liberalism but fosters an 'alternative modernity' - an ethics of equality, solidarity, and humility that counters radical individualism and consumerism. I reflect on the ways in which such alternative modernities offer critique or support for universal liberal paradigms such as human rights and the capability approach.

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