Paper short abstract:

This article examines the motivations and experiences of first time muslim women protestors in the Shaheen Bagh resistance in India. It shows how, these women personified an identity of 'mother-activists', and in doing so, erased the binaries between the 'ghar' (home) and the 'bahir' (outside).

Paper long abstract:

This article examines the motivations of first time women protestors for participating in the Shaheen Bagh resistance against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. It highlights women’s experiences of protesting for their and their children’s citizenship rights, and the impact that women’s presence in this struggle has made to the nature of the struggle itself. It argues firstly, that the role that these first-time women protestors played in these protests made them express and grow their political subjectivities as activists. Pinpointing the conditions under which women feel compelled to take up issues in the public domain of protest, or the ‘bahir’ (outside), this article shows that the threat that women felt to their and their children’s citizenship rights in their ‘ghar’ or home, was a primary consideration. Secondly, the article reflects on how these women brought their caring roles, hitherto carried out in the personal space of their ‘ghar’ (home), into the public space of protests, or the ‘bahir’ – thereby impacting the very nature and form of the struggle. In this way, the article proposes that the women protestors have personified and lived out a composite identity as ‘mother-activists’. This case shows how the public space of protest (or the ‘bahir’) can, and indeed has to, co-exist within and in conjunction to the private realm of women’s everyday lives (or the ‘ghar’), for their sustained participation in struggles. The paper proposes that in becoming mother-activists, women protestors erase and deconstruct the binaries between the ‘ghar’ and the ‘bahir’.