Messengers and media messages: Learning and knowledge of muslim women in India

Low literacy and poor access to educational facilities are serious issues confronting high proportions of Indian Muslim women and girls, especially in rural areas. Often missing in analyses of Indian Muslim womens education is engagement with Muslim women and girls own knowledge constructions, and what learning (formal and informal) means for them. Focusing on non-formal types of learning, the questions that drive this paper are how do Indian Muslim women approach knowledge and learning; and how do their diverse pursuits of learning influence their notions of identity? The paper draws on the methodology of meta-ethnography to contrast two very different ethnographic studies of Indian Muslim womens constructions of knowledge and identity: a South Indian vernacular woman healer; and New Delhi university undergraduate young women. In both cases, learning is deeply entwined with embodiment and with gendered forms of religious identity that respond to the interplay of Indias religious and ethnic pluralism.