International Conference on ‘Belonging/Unbelonging: Religion, Gender and ‘Everyday’ Politics in South Asia’

The intersection of religion, individuation and belongingness is a complex and multidimensional
issue spawned many interesting academic debates recently. These debates in general have
centred or problematized the continuous relevance and political force of religion in the face of
modernity and rationality, and the post-secular reformulation of the basic presumptions of them.
The issue is more expressive and pertinent in the current attempts of scrutinising the intimate
connections and contradictions in presupposing Submission and Agency, Sacred and Profane,
Private and Public. The current scholarship has focused on interactions between religion and
political institutions, the vast repertoire of religious traditions and practices as well as the
distinctiveness of religious belongings from other forms of belonging. There is also an emerging
emphasis on the ‘everyday’ and religion and its reflection on articulations of believing, behaving,
and belonging. Especially with a phenomenological turn in the study of religion, the religious
texts, symbols and practices, therefore, are not understood independently of their social
extensions. This development is crucial to the study of interface between the region and gender.
The continuous acknowledgement of patriarchy in feminist scholarship has given rise to a gender
perspective that has a nuanced understanding of belonging and un-belonging. Another site,
where gender meets religion is protests of various sorts by women’s movements in South Asia
for claiming citizenry rights and social and political spaces (Sabarimala Issue, Nuns fight against
sexual harassment, multiple debates and contexts around Hijab in Iran, France and Karnataka,
women’s gathering in Shaheen Bagh against CAA etc.). It is in this context, the School of Gender
Studies, Mahatma Gandhi University in collaboration with the Centre for Cross-national
Communication in South Asia, Mahatma Gandhi University is organizing a two-day national
seminar with a special focus on the theme Belonging/Unbelonging: Religion, Gender and Everyday
Politics in South Asia.