Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Hojai Muslim migrants, originally from Assam, navigate Mumbai's Mohammad Ali Road to establish new transnational networks. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on how religious practices construct and adapt spiritual imaginaries of migration.

Paper long abstract:

For more than a decade, Mohammad Ali Road has been attracting Muslim migrant workers to work in the hospitality and tourism industry. This neighbourhood has a strong overlap with Muslim networks due to the Hajj Committee of India. This paper examines Islamic practices in the neighbourhood through the use of religious techniques, such as tariqas, to transform Hojai migrants' social ties (silsilas) into transnational movements. The complexities of making and unmaking the neighbourhood into connectedness have amplified into a new trans-local environment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai, this paper argues how Hojai migrants can assimilate into spiritual imaginaries through the processes of labour. This led to the development of transnational practices and negotiations with different state and non-state actors (rent collectors, brokers, travel agents, visa traders, recruiting agencies, and NGOs), which have facilitated their move from Mumbai to the Arabian Peninsula. While the paper explores how the neighbourhood shaped religious attitudes, beliefs, and motivations, I draw my analysis through the intersection of migration and religion within the context of transcendence.

Based on the narratives of the interlocutors, this paper addresses two questions: firstly, how has knowledge of religious mobilization supported these Hojai migrants in Mumbai? Second, how does their religious experience shape Assam's Hojai? The paper engages these questions to understand religious practice as a heuristic analysis of tools, including their epistemic and material aspects. To this end, the paper reflects how the influence of religion impacted the social lives of migrants in a trans-local setting.