Claiming modernity through clothing: gender and education in Pakistani Muslim and Indian Hindu communities

ABSTRACT

Through focusing on forms of clothing, this article reveals how educated women from marginalized communities in Pakistan and India made differential claims to being modern. Our analysis of two ethnographic studies shows how the participants mobilized their subjectivities as modern and educated women through a distinction between ‘local modern’ and ‘local traditional’. In this article, our goal is not to define modernity, but instead to illuminate what it meant to be modern in both contexts. We integrate the narratives of young, rural Muslim women in Pakistan with those of young, rural Hindu women in India to disrupt the linear telling of the production of universal and homogenous modernity through education.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• women’s education
• comparative education
• gender
• modernity
• clothing
• Pakistan
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hijab is a headscarf that covers head and neck.

2. A pseudonym.

3. The KGBV program defines ‘most marginalized girls’ as girls who are lower caste, rural, and who have either never attended school before or dropped out more than two years ago.