Senior Research Seminar with Dr Ammara Maqsood (University College London)

The ephemerality of encounters: notes on Hindu-Muslim interactions in upwardly mobile Karachi

Dr. Ammara Maqsood (University College London)

To speak of friendships is to is to speak of a sense of familiarity and place. What, then, are the possibilities for and limits of relationality when one side can be rendered stranger at any moment? In this seminar, I reflect on this concern through a focus on a sense of ephemerality in interactions between young Hindus and Muslims who have migrated from smaller towns and villages to Karachi for education and employment. Faced with the ever-present spectre of a blasphemy accusation, my Hindu interlocuters invite and sometimes even cultivate the protection of their Muslim counterparts. Simultaneously, however, they remain vigilant that, at any moment, their position can change quite drastically and that they might need protection from these very ‘friends’. In other words, friends can be rendered stranger in an instant. These concerns give these Hindu-Muslim encounters a sense of ephemerality. Friendships (if one can call them that) form not so much out of choice and pleasure of company but out of proximity and practical need and often fade away as quickly as they form. Ephemeral relations, here, reflect and mimic majoritarian-minoritarian binaries and the history (and present) of partition in the subcontinent, but also exceed these logics to reveal traces of alternate ways of engaging with ‘others’.

Ammara Maqsood is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at University College London. Her research centres on middle-class religiosity, kinship, upward mobility and intimate aspirations in urban Pakistan. Her current work focuses on questions of religious difference in non-secular contexts and is funded by the ERC grant ‘Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings’. Ammara’s work has appeared in various leading journals, such as American Ethnologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and her book, The New Pakistani Middle Class (Harvard University Press), was awarded the 2019 AIPS Book Prize.