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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how stateless Rohingya refugees practice and interpret religion for temporary relief and dignity while struggling to assimilate into India. I investigate how Islamic piety channels their struggles to invert individual alienation through a prescriptive reconstitution of the self.

Paper Abstract:

This paper ethnographically investigates Rohingya 'statelessness' by examining the Tablighi Jamaat’s revivalist spiritualism among Rohingya refugees in the National Capital Region of India. Using the conceptual lens of “emptying” to understand the transient de-subjectification of the stateless Rohingya Muslims, I attempt to show how one of the most persecuted people in the world today seeks dignity in exile. Rohingya refugeehood, which is rooted in the Tablighi revivalist paradigm, focuses on interiorizing their struggles to be able to shed worldly attachments while reconstituting pious selfhood that is modeled on the Prophet. Such willful 'self-emptying' through ritual enactments of proselytized worship powerfully inverts an engulfing alienation amidst the brutal loss of all familiar identity coordinates in their country of asylum. While Tablighi devotion channels their stateless uncertainties towards a renewed and sacred purpose, it provides relief from an agonized identity through a vivid rupture in their present suffering.

Yet tensions remain as Rohingya belonging also signifies avoidance of assimilation with host cultures. This paper examines such complex entanglements between religious de-subjectification and persisting liminal and geopolitical dislocation. While Rohingya Muslims achieve temporary dignity in belonging to the 80 million-strong international revivalist movement, defined by enduring faith linkages beyond lands or ethnicities, the scope of refuge may ultimately be ephemeral without ceding refugee isolation. By investigating conceptual interplays between ritualized self-emptying, identity negotiation, and quests for rootedness amongst deterritorialized peoples, this paper aims to expand anthropological understandings of what shared piety provides persecuted people living in between lands, identities and hegemonic socio-political formations.