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Talk by Ghazal Asif (Anthropology, Lahore University of Management Science)

 

For the past decade, the press in Pakistan has remained rife with stories of the kidnapping, forcible conversion to Islam, and marriages of young Hindu women at the hands of Muslim men. Women’s rights and minority advocacy groups have demanded a state-led response, but two attempts at legislation have already failed. In courts, legal redress requires a clear, visible difference between forcible abduction and what is termed “free will” elopement. However, these matters are complicated further when the very nature of Hindu women’s desires appears indeterminate. Accusations that young Hindu women have been seduced (warghalana) into conversion by Muslim men compete with claims that such women leave their natal homes upon becoming irrepressibly attracted to Islam and the Prophet. Drawing on an archive of conversions, elopements, and love affairs that I have been collecting since 2014, in this talk I problematize reductive binaries that focus only on the presence or absence of “free will”, to ask how hierarchies of il/licit desire feed into the public question of just who can claim control of young Hindu women’s bodies in Pakistan. I argue that the seeming unknowability of women’s desires underscores the entangled sexual and religious stakes at the heart of these events.

 

Ghazal Asif Farrukhi is an 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.

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