Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the ways in which Dawoodi Bohras - a Shia Muslim sect of around one million globally – make sense of their socio-religious identity constituted by multiple strands of intersecting positionalities emerging from their local, national, and transnational contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing primarily on Mumbai, the Bohra community’s religious and administrative ‘headquarters’ the paper is structured around two research question: Firstly, within the socio-political and cultural context of historical and contemporary South Asia how does one account for and examine intra-communal difference and its inter-communal dynamics and implications? Secondly, and more specifically, how and to what extent do the overlaps and entanglements between the Dawoodi Bohra community’s ideas of modernism and traditionalism reflect a narrative of exceptionalism that complicates and problematises categorical identity formation and its politics in India? In doing so, it seeks to simultaneously traverse and unpack a conceptual and methodological tightrope for understanding how the dichotomies of universalism and specificity, mobility and rootedness, authority and individualism, cosmopolitanism and parochialism and, presence and absence inform and complicate the Bohra community’s relationships and dynamics with and within : 1) the locality (Native Town and Bhendi Bazaar); 2) the city (Bombay/Mumbai); 3) the nation (India) and; 4) the community (religious/global/regional/transregional). This shall be done by looking at the ongoing Bohra community-led Bhendi Bazaar urban redevelopment project in Mumbai employing the conceptual lens of critical infrastructure studies. The paper combines the methodologies of ethnographic and archival research, to navigate the past and the present to understand how this current moment of colossal infrastructural dissembling and re-assembling opens-up questions of belonging, memory, nostalgia, aspiration, identity, and politics which provide specific insights into Bohra imaginaries of the self and the other along the four aforementioned registers.