Ziyana Fazal

My dissertation "Contesting Islam and Secular Modernity: Māppila Women in Kerala, 1940-1980" reconsiders the relationship between gender, Islam, and secularism in South Asia by examining how Māppila Muslim women in Kerala used Islamic reform to articulate new forms of secular citizenship. Rather than treating secularism and religious identity as opposing categories, I show how Māppila women negotiated their simultaneous belonging to the secular Indian nation-state and the umma (global Islamic community). Through multilingual writings in Arai-Malayalam, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, and English, it traces how women engaged with Islamic reform, caste, and ideas of secular citizenship to reshape Muslim womanhood in the decades surrounding Indian independence.

The dissertation also traces the circulation of Māppila women's writings across South Asia, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Combining archival research, literary translation, close textual analysis, and oral history, it examines how Māppila women writers and editors created intellectual and literary networks across linguistic and national boundaries. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that religious and linguistic identities mapped neatly onto national boundaries, showing instead how Māppila women's multilingual practices connected regional and global Muslim worlds while shaping new forms of secular belonging.