Inheriting Caste: Minorities Out of Time in Muslim South Asia

In 2017, a seemingly small change in Pakistan’s questionnaire for the upcoming census sparked vociferous debates about religious identity and the politics of recognition.

While the questionnaire listed “Scheduled Caste” as a separate religion rather than a Hindu subcategory as it had previously done, the Pakistani state typically views caste as an anachronistic holdover from a discarded, interreligious past.

Some saw this bureaucratic shift as an attempt to further diminish the Hindu minority and prop up the national Muslim majority, reopening old wounds about religious nationalism. Anti-caste progressives saw an opportunity to unsettle an entrenched Hindu-Muslim binary and imagine alternative political horizons for minority recognition and citizenship.

How do untimely state projects render new political aspirations legible? How are categories of social analysis around caste and religion produced as minorities renegotiate imposed categories and conditional citizenship?

Paying attention to rumors, enumerative practices, and political campaigns around the census, this talk argues that tools of bureaucratic documentation catalyze the reactivation of unsettled histories and the imagination of new possibilities of recognition from within the state’s margins.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

Ghazal Asif Farrukhi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at LUMS, Lahore. In 2024-25, she is a fellow at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Ghazal is currently completing a book manuscript provisionally titled 'Hindu Intimacies Amidst Pakistan’s Muslim State', which focuses on how Hindu women navigate ritual, devotional, and social boundaries while constituting the interface for the state-led reform of religiously minoritized communities. She also writes on the politics of caste emancipation in Pakistan. Her research has been published in 'American Ethnologist, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies', and 'South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies'.