Contesting ‘Citizenship’: Voices of Pakistani Refugee Women
摘要
This chapter focuses on reimagining the notion of citizenship through the lens of uprooted refugee women belonging to different groups taking refuge in India. Through the lens of Pakistani Hindu refugee women, this chapter problematises the notion of citizenship as a legal and institutional category. The reflections in this chapter are based on fieldwork conducted with Pakistani Hindu refugee women in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. It explores the intersections of gender and citizenship and discusses how women engage with the concept of citizenship not simply as a legal entitlement but as a lived and negotiated experience. These women, despite their legal exclusion, do not see themselves as non-citizens. Their everyday lives and roles as wage labourers, carers, and organisers within settlements point towards a form of performative citizenship that resists conventional state-centric frameworks. The chapter argues that these women contest the citizen–non-citizen binary and disrupt the normative refugee image as passive or apolitical. Their narratives offer an alternative imagination of citizenship based on presence, resilience, and everyday negotiations, challenging the idea that legal status alone defines political belonging.