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Paper short abstract

Environmentally displaced Bengali Muslims in Assam, India, face precarity, state neglect, and everyday slow violence. Through an ethnographic account of a wedding, the paper shows care as resistance disrupted by infrastructural failures, and minority citizenship shaped by ‘soundscapes of violence’.

Paper long abstract

Precarity and material dispossession is a part of everyday life for people displaced by floods and riverbank erosion by the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. Over and above environmental displacement, ethnic minority Bengali Muslims encounter state discrimination and neglect while accessing material infrastructures. The everyday slow violence inhabits various arenas of social reproduction, eroding social worlds and curtailing infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski,2020).

In times of everyday structural violence, economies of care through rituals of social reproduction become important sites of resistance, to hope for stable futures. Through an ethnographic account of a Bengali Muslim wedding celebration, this paper reflects on the roles played by family elders to ensure social mobility for their future generation. By creating spaces of care at the wedding, they attempt to elevate their status via symbolic means. However, their celebrations are interrupted with the fear of right-wing Hindutva violence and censorship. Intermittent functioning of electric infrastructure interrupt wedding rituals. Simultaneously, a diesel-generator powered loudspeaker nearby overpowers conversations and prayers at the wedding, with persistent Hindu devotional songs. Celebratory feasts are held in silence with careful utterance of categories of meats served at the table.

Analysed through the lens of ‘soundscapes of violence’, the paper focuses on amplified sounds, noises, silences, and interruptions to reflect on minority populations’ experiences of infrastructural citizenship, while extending care. While doing so, it emphasises the quiet, private, secular citizenship that Muslims must perform in contemporary India, to make sense of everyday slow violence at the eroding riverbank, while aspiring for stable futures.