ABSTRACT
A young Muslim woman living in Hindu, India, when asked what reason she had for wearing a hijab, gave an elaborate explanation. She answered that her Hindu friends “always considered her to be one of them (non-Muslim)”, while she felt that she “belonged to them (Muslims)”. In contrast to what could be expected of a positive embrace, she “started feeling bit of a cheat”. She was faced with an existential dilemma: “Why was I lying to them about my identity?” So she started contemplating the idea of wearing a scarf, “My way of asserting an identity of being the person I was. . . . [and that’s what] I wanted to tell them.” This woman made a bold statement about what it felt like when one was attributed a wrong ethnic identity. She felt the need to be and make visible her Muslim identity in a context where members of the majority embraced her in an amicable but also paternalistic way by valuing her as “being one of them”, that is a Hindu. She did not want to be a clone of majoritarinism for being accepted. She had her own Muslim identity, was proud of it and wanted to assert it (Wagner et al., 2012).
