b/ordering, prefiguring and refusing in the anti-CAA struggle (2019-20) and the postcolonial racial Indian nation-state

Abstract

This research offers an alternative reading of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act movement from its margins. I detail how existing scholarship on the Muslim-led struggle, which mobilised against a far-right Islamophobic citizenship law in India, limits its meaning, purpose and potential for prefiguring azadi (liberation) through the hermeneutic of the secular nation-state. In response, I foreground protest practices, formations and imaginaries that are marginalised in scholarship to theorise the prefigurative potential of the struggle for azadi beyond the horizon of the state. Through a close reading of marginalised protestors’ testimonies, I highlight how left-liberal scholarship and majoritarian allies b/order and other Muslims’ articulations of faith, solidarity, mothering and survival that exceed the racialised and gendered terms of the state. This reveals how left-liberal allies and the secular state are implicated in Indian Islamophobia, while also stressing the prefigurative potential of Muslims’ insurgent practices in refusing subjugation and annihilation. These findings lay bare the role of academic scholarship in disciplining struggle and entrenching uneven power relations; the limitations of the left-liberal Indian state for ensuring justice for marginalised communities; and the liberatory potential of marginalised survival practices against the state. Therefore, my research extends scholarship on Critical Social Movement Studies, the concept-practices of prefiguration and refusal, theorisations of race and racial/caste capitalism in India, the coloniality of postcolonial states, and Critical Kashmir Studies.

Thesis embargoed. Available: 11/08/2028

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Robin Dunford (Supervisor) & Megha Rajguru (Supervisor)