ABSTRACT
By looking at the ways school-going Muslim girls in Assam construct ‘self’ in their personal narratives, this chapter challenges the idea of a fixed category of ‘Muslim girl’. Instead highlighting how Muslim girls ‘carry with them multiple intertwined identities’ based on their personal and collective experiences (Kirmani, 2009: 49). The main argument of this paper is that Muslim girls both resist and conform to the subjectivities conferred upon them in the wider society, using their reflexive abilities. By connecting their reflexive capacities with Bourdieu’s theorisation on the politics of authorisation this paper views these reconstructions of ‘self’ undertaken by Muslim girls as bids of authorisation in order to become legitimate actors in the field of education and the wider society by drawing attention towards four storylines about the ‘self’, namely: (a) the ‘Good’ (Indian) Muslim self, (b) the proud ‘Miyah’ self, (c) decently modern self, and the (d) aspirational victim self.
