Doing style for Saraswati Puja : Girlhood,Class,and Community Identity among Muslim girls in Assam

Introduction

Muslim girls’ dressing-up practices are extensively discussed but are seldom engaged with to offer insights into the challenges of navigating girlhood in contemporary times. We draw from feminist scholarship on gendered selves, and debates on codes of respectable femininity in the South Asian context to examine the discursive practice of ‘doing style’ and ‘dressing up’ by Muslim girls. In particular, we engage with discourses around Saraswati Puja ¹ that is widely celebrated by youth clubs and educational institutions in eastern India. ² Normalisation of majoritarian religious symbols in educational institutions has been a matter of much public debate and discussion in India but the gendered modes of participation in these festivities by Muslim girls have received relatively little attention. This paper dwells on how Muslim girls experience girlhood at a time when majoritarian cultural ideals fuse with neoliberal consumption cultures and set the gender codes of respectability in public spaces like schools.

It is a common sight that young women and girls, get dressed in mekhela sador ³ and saree ⁴ , to visit the pandals or the makeshift tents on Saraswati Puja. Regional TV shows, newspapers, e-papers, and online shows repeatedly refer to and discuss the ‘beautifully dressed girls’ in ways that present conflicting ideas about modernity, fashion, and style. For example, a popular Assamese channel organizes a ‘selfie’ based beauty contest that live telecasts the process of selecting ‘the winner’ and holds panel discussions. The panel includes designers of garments and jewelry, makeup artists, and similar professionals based in Kamrup Metropolitan area. Such discussions usually focus on themes of fashion and religiosity amidst a general lament that women of the notun projonmo or new generation are excessively indulgent in fashion. In other words, young women and girls are stereotypically portrayed as invested in ‘style’ which needs to be checked through the right kind of balance of tradition and modernity. These representations assume and produce homogenised images of a ‘new generation’ of girls without any consideration of how ‘style’ can be contingent on class, community, and ethnic identities. Moreover, girls from lower classes and minority religious groups often remain invisible in such media discourses on the ‘new generation’. In this paper, we examine how Muslim girls articulate their identity while negotiating norms of respectable femininity from varied positions of age, class, religion, and ethnicity in a Hindu majoritarian cultural setting.

The paper is organised into four sections. The first section examines how Muslim girls’ experiences of dressing up and doing style offer a vantage point to examine school as a site of engaging with codes of femininity. The second section introduces the methods and the context of the study and explains the politics of ethnic attire specific to Assam. The third section presents girls’ accounts of negotiating the majoritarian religious codes of participating in Saraswati Puja by redefining puja and relying on their friendship group sociality. The fourth section examines how these girls negotiate the conflicting set of demands because of their specific positions as students and as girls invested in style.

Codes of femininity and educational institutions

Girlhood is a complex terrain to experience and navigate in contemporary times when girls are caught between expectations of varied sorts that may range from adhering to consumer market-driven trends of fashioning the self to reconfigured notions of respectable femininity (Harris, 2004; Kehily, 2004; Pomerantz, 2008). In this context, post-colonial and feminist scholarship is insightful in specifying the contradictions involved in the configurations of femininity in the project of modern nation-building. In Chatterjee’s (1989) analysis, the dichotomy of the material and the spiritual, of the public, and private worlds was applied to construe middle-class femininity in ways that set them apart from Western as well as lower-class Indian women in terms of respectability (Chatterjee, 1989). The ethos of respectability is being reconstituted at a time of rapid expansion of the commodity market in India where middle-class women are expected to display the right kind of choices in the consumption of fashion (Gilbertson, 2014; Lukose, 2009; Radhakrishnan, 2009). Matthews and Lukose propose that the hypervisibility of such consumption has intensified the desire for aesthetic investments among the lower classes and the historically marginalised groups making them more vulnerable in the absence of a structure of social security and support (Matthews and Lukose, 2020). In this respect, engaging with style and fashion is often considered as a hallmark of youth identity. In a seminal account of youth identity and style, Nakassis (2013) suggests how the performative act of ‘doing style’ is constitutive of youth that seeks to transgress the adult authority structure. He also presents a gendered account of young men and women indulging in style. In his view, young men’s performance of style is more driven by peer group contexts, while adult norms of respectability did loom large on girls and restricted their capacity to ‘do style’ and gain status. In other words, ‘doing style’ was problematic for girls and was strongly proscribed by adult authority in college.

Similarly, studies that focused on the consumption of fashion among Muslim girls suggest that they faced harsh judgments and risked persecution for indulging in fashionable clothing that is perceived to be either Western or non-Muslim (Chakraborty, 2009; Osella and Osella, 2007).These studies suggest that while the prevalence of codes of respectable femininities is reported across classes, religious communities, and regions in India, there is little academic work on how young women and girls engage with these codes by indulging in ‘style’.

It is not a coincidence that in some of these studies, formal education emerges as a contradictory space that disciplines as well as enables the articulation of youth identities (Chakraborty, 2009; Lukose, 2009; Nakassis, 2013). Sociological studies of education have illuminated how schools are involved in producing classed, gendered, and racialised subjectivities among students (Bettie, 2002; Morris, 2005; Reay, 2001). Such subjectivities emerge in interaction with the pedagogic context of a school that moulds student identities in terms of academic success and failure (Arnot and Reay, 2007; Reay, 2001). In other words, the learner identities of students as good or bad students interact with their identities of class, race, and gender within the school setting producing specific kinds of gender regimes. These regimes, however, do not go unchallenged by the students. They resist school authority including the dominant codes of gender. In a seminal contribution, Bettie (2002) highlights how girls negotiated ‘school-sanctioned femininity’ through their practice of dress. For example, ‘non-prep’ ‘colored’ girls maintained a distance from ‘prep’ girls and codes of femininity by using darker shades of makeup and wearing dresses that emphasized rather than neutralized their ‘feminine’ appearance (Bettie, 2002: 15).

Ethnographic studies of schools in India have highlighted how ideas about femininity in schools are usually modeled on cultural practices associated with caste-Hindu ideals of girlhood and femininity (Dube, 2001; Kumar, 2010; Manjrekar, 2011). The implications of such cultural majoritarian ideals in the lives of girls from Muslim communities and how they engage with such ideals have not received due attention. Hussain (2019), in her work on contemporary Muslim girlhood, highlights the authorisation struggles that engage Muslim families and girl students in Assam. While describing Muslim girls’ engagement with codes of femininities, she identifies how different aspects of Muslim selves were enacted through dressing and food choices in school space to avoid negative evaluations and to present alternative evaluations of self (Hussain, 2019). The question of how normative femininities are being articulated, contested, and negotiated from marginal locations of girlhood assumes significance at a time when normalisation of Hindu cultural symbols, artifacts, and modes of worship as ‘Indian’ in schools is on ascendence along with the rise of consumption cultures around festivities (Benei, 2008; Bhuyan and Goswami, 2022; Sriprakash and Possamai, 2011).

The codes of dressing at school

The discussions in this paper draw from the observations of school life, particularly focussed on the preparation and organisation of Saraswati Puja, and how it is experienced by Muslim girl students. The fieldwork was conducted in a government-aided senior secondary school in Central Assam where Muslims constituted two-thirds of the student population. The majority of them identified as Muslims of Bengal origin, and a few as Assamese Muslims. ⁵ Other less numerous groups included Bengali Hindus, Adibasi or ex-tea garden workers, ⁶ and Hindi-speaking students of Bihar origin. Like other government-aided schools in the town, it catered to families from lower-income groups. In the year 2018–19, it had 470 students. Most of their parents were employed in manual and insecure jobs on a daily wage basis as cart and rickshaw pullers, construction workers, cleaners, and in other forms of manual work. In contrast, the teachers represented middle-class social status with secure incomes. All of them were Assamese speakers, the regional official language of education that is valued and preferred within the school. There was a small group of Muslim teachers who identified themselves as Assamese Muslims.

School authority followed codes of gender which differentiated girl students from boys and women teachers from men while entrusting the teachers to enforce these codes on the students. For example, on a regular day, the girls are expected to fold and pin their dupattas on the kurta on both shoulders and drape it widely to cover their breasts. The dupatta would come down below the chest to the navel of the girls to ensure full coverage. The code of dress includes strictures about not just what is prescribed in terms of school uniforms but also includes instructions on avoiding the use of makeup and jewelry for girls. Using hair styling products is strictly prohibited in school. The girls are supposed to tie their hair in two neat and tight braids so that there are no hairs over their faces to distract them. The school uniform for male students was a light blue shirt with a school badge and navy-blue long pants. These codes are supposed to be maintained throughout the academic session through regular checking and punishments. However, most often these were secretively violated. For example, many girls loved to leave out hair strands loose and played with it during school hours. They also violated the codes of avoiding inter-mixing with boys. Among teachers’ code of formality was followed by both men and women, however, women teachers were also expected to present a demure modest self by wearing saree or mekhela-sador in a way that fully covered them.

Our study primarily draws from interviews with Muslim girl students of grade nine and observations of school life related to the celebration of the Puja. The interviews were conducted before the puja in December and January in the academic year 2018–2019. Their batch included 18 girls of which 12 were Muslims. Of these, 10 Muslim girls identified as Miya Muslims and two identified as Assamese speaking Muslims. The Miya Muslim girls belonged to the lower-class groups with their parents mainly involved in unskilled jobs (manual and insecure jobs), and the other two were from a lower-middle-class background with relatively secure occupations. Their age ranged between 13 and 16. Our paper primarily deals with the experiences of the first set of girls identified as Miya girl students. These girls had a relatively lower academic and social reputation in the eyes of teachers. The two Assamese Muslim girl students had higher academic status and their accounts have been somewhat different than the Miya Muslim girls that we discuss in detail in later part of the paper.

Locating the experiences of Muslims in contemporary Assam must consider the consolidation of Hindu majoritarian politics as well as the regional historical specificities that have framed the experiences of Muslims in Assam. Here Muslims do not constitute a homogeneous group and are often differentiated as Assamese and Miya Muslims in terms of place of origin, claims to indigeneity, and class and status positions (Hussain, 2019; Saikia, 2021). The discourses of migration and indigeneity have placed Muslims of Bengal origin, or Miya Muslims, in a vulnerable position vis-a-vis the indigenous groups of Assam and politically marked them as ‘illegal immigrants’. The governmental exercise of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), enactment of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and the extension of Hindu majoritarian politics in the north-eastern state have added to the politics of vilification of the Miyas making their lives more precarious (Saikia, 2021). The recent attempts at the assertion of Miya culture and identity and the public debate ensuing it have brought to the surface the deep polarisations among communities and the widespread stigmatisation that the Miya community faces in Assam. Likewise, Miya women are either viewed as poor women or as passive sexual subjects who are always in need of reform.

In this study, we look at Muslim girls’ as actively engaging with the school-sanctioned codes of femininity through their practice of dressing. A focus on friendship groups was particularly useful as it helped us understand how the disciplinary space of school is experienced by girls on their terms. Studies have pointed out how girls’ friendship groups at school give them a space for solidarity without overtly challenging the dominant ideas about girlhood and femininity (Kehily, 2004; McRobbie, 1978).

We are aware that our status as grown-up educated women with a caste-Hindu background positions us in a skewed relationship of power vis-a-vis the Miya girl students. However, identities are never fixed. As women scholars working in formal educational settings and having been subjected to disciplinary codes of dressing at various points in our own lives, we could empathise with the girl students at the school. Particularly, the second author was able to connect with most female students at the school as a young unmarried student. Her sartorial choices of loose tunic and trousers, made her resemble the students and distant from their teachers, and her non-adherence to the formal dress code meant for the teachers at school was pointed out on more than one occasion at school.

Mekhela Sador and the politics of ethnic attire

During fieldwork, we noticed significant differences in how teachers and the majority of girls dressed up on the occasion of Saraswati Puja. Unlike regular days, all the female teachers wore expensive, handwoven mekhela sador in subdued colours and designs for the occasion. In contrast, the Miya Muslim girls mostly wore sarees that were inexpensive, made of synthetic fabric, and were in brighter shades. Their sarees were in colourful hues of blues, reds, and green with equally striking borders and embellishments. They also wore large earrings, heavy neckpieces, and sets of bangles, carried decorated bags, and used makeup products. The only exceptions were the two Assamese-speaking Muslim girls who wore mekhela sador like their teachers. Their dress was not expensive but was lighter in shades from the sarees worn by other Muslim friends (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Friends’ group dressed in saree and mekhela sador.

Before discussing what dressing up for puja meant for them it is important to note that in Assam it is mekhela sador, a two-piece attire, that has a higher symbolic significance as a marker of feminine identity over saree on occasions like Saraswati Puja. It became a marker of respectable femininity in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Assam that helped define the middle-class-caste-Hindu women in ethnic terms (Medhi, 2013). Saree, a one-piece garment worn with a blouse and petticoat, that acquired a pan-Indian status in colonial and post-colonial contexts of nation-building projects elsewhere, became symbolic of Bengali identity in Assam (Medhi, 2013; Sharma, 2019). The ethnicization and standardization of the feminine dress helped in differentiating Assamese-middle-class- women not just from their Bengali counterparts, but also elevated their status vis-à-vis other women from the lower classes, including the tribal women and the migrant women workers (Medhi, 2013).

Studies on Muslim women of Bengal origin in contemporary Assam have noted how their ‘traditional’ forms of dress have given way to saree, unlike the Assamese Muslim women who have adopted mekhela sador. Among the younger women, they are taking to salwar kamiz, a common attire preferred by young women across communities that consists of a set of tunics and trousers (Sultana, 2019). The scant literature on the dressing practice of Muslim women in Assam suggests that Miya women are often stereotyped as “wearing a cheap cotton saree” in bright colours and covering their heads with a veil or scarf (Dasgupta, 2019; Pathan and Jha, 2022). However, the saree that the Miya girls in our study picked up for Puja was completely different from the ones that their mothers would wear for work on an everyday basis. These sarees were adorned with embellishments and kept for special occasions like weddings. The girls didn’t own such sarees and preferred borrowing from younger female relatives in the family.

Muskaan, a Miya girl from the batch said that she borrows clothes either from her sister-in-law who was a young bride, or from cousins who were older than her.

Agot discuss kori lou, ki pindhim, nipindhu. Ammar kapur nipindhu, jane nohoi ammar agor modelor kapur bur ase. Baar pindhu, bhabir pindhu… xetor kapur bur bhal ase, design sisign thaka thake. Ammar tu xei boring ekdom plain nisina jen.

(First, we discuss what to wear or not. Don’t wear from mother…you know her clothes are old fashioned. I usually wear the clothes of my sister, of my sister-in-law. They have good clothes unlike my mother's. Their clothes have more patterns and motifs while my mother's clothes are boring)

Therefore, these sarees were important to project youthful identities that are invested in fashion and in looking good. Wasima, another Miya girl whom we interviewed, concurred that some of the students went to school just to do style and look good.

Mur pora lage kisumane style kora karone jai, style kori dhunia koi saree pindhi, muk besi dhunia lagibo lage buli vabi jai. Kisumane dharma karone jai. Muslim logor bur kiyo jai janu…dhormo karone tu najai xeitu janu

(I feel some girls go to (puja) do style, to nicely wear the saree, to make sure that they look pretty. Some (Hindus) go for religious reasons. Don't know why the Muslims go, not for religious purposes, that much I know).

Saraswati Puja, therefore, acquires a different meaning for them, as an occasion to dress up in a saree and to look good. This extends the argument made by Nakassis (2013) concerning status politics among college-going youth, where the strategies of doing style are a way of differentiating themselves from the adult world by attempting to transgress the hierarchies associated with it.

However, it is never easy to transcend the adult social order. The girls did manage to do style in a way that emphasized their youthful identities but they were continuously made subjects of negative evaluations for these very reasons by their teachers and school administration. As school administration expected them to uphold the middle-class and upper-caste codes of feminine respectability by dressing marjit bhabe or modestly. The teachers expressed concerns about both the excess of fashion and inappropriate style during Puja that conflicted with the dress code. For example, Pankaj, a 35-year-old teacher who was given the task of organizing the event, remarked that the puja has turned into a xundori protiyogita or a beauty contest. The charge of turning the puja into a beauty contest is directed at young girls and has a specific connotation here. The dismissal of the fashion sensibilities, taste, and aesthetics embodied by the majority of female students is indicative of how the symbolic economy of style at school is dominated by caste-Hindu, middle-class norms of propriety. Our research suggests that the girl students, Miya Muslim girls, in this case, worked within the context of friendship-based groups with alternate forms of evaluations about engaging in style even if it meant transgressing the school-sanctioned codes of femininity. Scholars highlight young Muslim women’s desire for fashion items is often circumscribed by considerations of class and community (Chakraborty, 2009; Osella and Osella, 2007). Such desires make them seek safer spaces to practice fashion in private. In this context, dressing up for puja with friends provided them an opportunity to indulge in fashion and style in the school space. However, as Muslim girls in a Hindu religious ceremony, they were precariously positioned in this setting. Their choice and manner of participation in this event call for a more detailed analysis.

Dressing up for Saraswati Puja as Muslim girls

The puja is one of the most popular events that is organised at school, partly because of its association with students as learners, but primarily because of the festive feel that it generates and the partial relaxation of the stringent disciplinary rules. The teaching-learning activities are suspended for the day and the school acquires a colourful look with a makeshift tent erected on the school ground where the idol of the goddess is placed. Students from outside are allowed to visit the school and the teachers don’t occupy centre stage in assembly grounds or classrooms. The visitors include diverse communities and caste groups. As (Bhattacharya, 2007) has argued about Durga puja celebrations in colonial Bengal, the festivities acquired a public character in the city of Calcutta where participants could vary by class, community, and class affiliations, but their modes of participation were differentiated. Similarly, the Saraswati puja tents or pandals at the school also become a public site that might be open to a diverse set of young men and women from different communities and castes, but the associated rituals retain a sacredness that is rooted in caste and gender-based norms of purity and pollution (Bhuyan, 2023). Nevertheless, the rest of the school grounds become relatively free for loitering around with friends. Because of these associations, most Muslim girls from grade nine loved attending the school on this day and acknowledged its popularity among students.

Asbina is very fond of going to school on the day of Saraswati puja because of the opportunity to roam around and mingle with peers from outside school.

Eman veer hoi, sob ahe, akou murti aani puja kore… Moi usorot jau kintu puja he nokoru…Saraswati pujat tu furi thaku ekdom, pura furi thaku aru baki schoolor logor kita ahe amar school.

(I like it as everyone comes and it is crowded… the idol is brought for worship as well. I go near the idol but I don’t worship or pray. On Saraswati puja I roam around a lot…friends from outside school also come to school on this day)

As a Muslim girl, she did not engage in the worship part but she thoroughly enjoyed loitering around because otherwise girls’ mobility in public spaces is heavily restricted.

Wasima, gave a different meaning to the event when she associated it with vidya or learning, an activity that is close to her student identity. She was very excited about the event as a student and did not think that participating in the event in school mattered much as a Muslim.

Saraswati vidya maa je, schoolot Saraswati puja patibo lage. Schoolot phool diye, vidya paat diye xeidina. Manuhe koise phool, vidya paat kitapot thole porhat bhal hoi. Monor kolpona.. misa kotha hoi… Tothapiu thobo lage.

This is not to suggest that she is not aware of the sacred aspects of the festival which limits her participation in it as a Muslim. She added that her friends did not mind how she participated in the event and all she had to do was to be careful about not offending people from her neighbourhood.

Phot lole, anjali lole logor khiniye beya buliu nokoi. Kintu ghoror usoror khiniye beya buli koi, gaon manuhe kobo pare je Hindu manuhor phot loi. Kintu schoolor logor bure nokoi. Kaku aji loike kua nai. Gaonor manuhe beya pabo pare.

(If I take the holy dot and the offerings, my friends won’t mind it but my neighbours would condemn me. My village folks might say that I take the Hindu offerings, but not my friends at school. They (friends) have never reported anything. Village folks may take offense)

This trust in friends at school is an important aspect of the relatively egalitarian forms of youth sociality that characterise friendship groups which would seek to temporally suspend the hierarchies of the adult world order without challenging it overtly. In this case, it is suggested that the school context and their status as students helped them overcome the dilemma of participating in a Hindu festival as Muslim girls.

We witnessed expressions of similar dilemmas in accounts where the Muslim girls needed more careful navigation of the puja as a Hindu ritual space. In one instance, a Hindu boy, who was in charge of the puja offerings, applied a phot or the holy dot on the forehead of two Muslim girls by mistake. In his defence, he explained that he got confused about girls’ religious identity because of the bindi on their foreheads. Bindi is a popular fashion object, a stick-on, that many girls put on their foreheads. It is a common perception that Muslim girls do not take bindi because of its resemblance with phot, a holy dot. Osella and Osella (2007) referring to women in south India stated that the bindi even when it consists of fashionable patterns, signifies feminine auspiciousness in Hindu terms, and therefore is not considered appropriate for adult Muslim women. However, in this school, some Muslim girls took stick-on bindis as a fashion item that comes in different shapes and colors and can be easily removed when not needed. The phot is often made afresh using sandalwood paste or vermilion making it messier to remove. The girls were upset about the phot and they confided in the researcher that they would wash it away before leaving the school campus to avoid getting scolded at home. For them, the stick-on bindi was a fashion accessory that does not take anything away from her religious identity, unlike the ceremonial phot which is taken as a marker of the religious identity of a Hindu.

Jahida, one of the two Miya girls, indicated her complex modes of engaging with pooja at school by clarifying that she does not worship the idol or accept the phot that is given by the priest, but she takes the consumable offering or proxad.

Moi puja nokoru. Enei proxad dile khau kintu puja nokoru moi. Khisiri khau, boot mogu khau, but aru eta kiba diye je…pujar xomoyot je kahi pora kiba diye je heitu nolou. Pujar time t najau, ba boha nai. Pasot khua xomoyot jau, enei bohibo koi kintu ami nobohu. Ma’am hoti jur jobordostiu nokore, kisuman Hindu..kintu muslim lora suwali tu bohut ase nohoi, heikarone jur jobordosti nokore. Bohile bohok, nobohile nai.

(I don’t worship the deity but I have the food that is offered to the deity. I eat the porridge offering but I don’t accept other things that are given as offerings. I don’t go to school during the time of worship and even if I go, I don’t sit near the place of worship. I generally go at the time when food is being served. Some teachers ask us to sit near the place of worship (though not forced) but we don’t sit. In our school, there are some Hindu students, but since there are a lot of Muslims, they don’t force us to sit…if we want to sit, we can; if not, it is all right).

The above accounts suggest how a Muslim girl navigates a Hindu religious space both as a girl student and as a Muslim. Saba Hussain, in a similar setting, identified the narratives of a good (Indian) Muslim girlhood to describe a practice that is modeled within a Hindu normative Universe in a public space with space for disagreements in private (Hussain, 2021). The examples presented here also hint towards similar processes of adapting overtly while maintaining their religious identity in private. Additionally, we gain insights into the significance of youth sociality in their lives which helps them in redefining the meaning of majoritarian cultural symbols. They do so by sticking to the group norms of doing style within school premises while keeping secrets from family and village folks.

The risks of doing style as a student

Girls work with localised set of ideas that are rooted in notions of honour and reputation among peers (Kehily, 2004; Skeggs, 1997). Girls’ friendship groups play an important role in this process because it is in and through their groups that these girls develop ideas about dressing up in popular ways. The act of dressing up, and the associated fun and excitement are key to the sustenance of groups. The girls continued discussing days before the festival about what to wear, what hairstyle they would follow, and the accessories that they were going to wear.

Nazmin, a Miya girl says,

Lora burok enei xudhu aru ki pindhibi..kintu suwali bilakok xudhu aru toi ki colour pindhibi, toi xeitu colouror pindhibi, suli ki style koribi.. Saree pindhile muk kotiya he lage neki. Heel pindhu tothapiu lage…photot nelage

(We ask the boys what they would wear casually. But we ask the girls what they would wear, what colour they wear, and what type of hairstyle would they sport. I look short when I wear a saree, and even though I wear heels still I look short…but not in the pictures)

Preparations involved visiting their relatives and neighbors’ homes to find suitable dress. The sarees and other accessories were borrowed and ‘booked’ in advance for the day.

Asbina expressed her excitement about the day and admitted that she feels shy to wear a saree, but she does it to follow her friends. She thinks it would be odd to do otherwise and she would stand out from the rest which is not right.

Sobei jen jabo style kori moi jodi najau kenekua lagibo beya lagibo no, mur porau tu beya lagibo? Heikarone moiu saree pindhijau

(When everyone goes after doing style, and I don’t go how would it feel, it feels bad right? Won’t it look bad on my part? That’s why I wear a saree)

Trying to fit in and not stand out from group members is a strong drive that makes girls of common age groups and ethnic backgrounds follow similar styles even risking personal and social costs in the process. The risks involved their sexualised and ethnicised representations, which have been reported in studies on racial and ethnic minority students in school (Bettie, 2002; Morris, 2005). Likewise, when Muslim girls actively engaged in ‘doing style’ as per the standards set among their friends, it had repercussions on their reputation as students. For many students, one major risk was to be labelled as a style kora suwali or a girl who indulges in doing style. This was shared by girls who identified themselves as average students and were neither viewed as high achievers nor as troublemakers. The concern about their reputation in the eyes of teachers was always present even while transgressing the rules of appropriate femininity. Scholars have argued that one needs to be alert to the analytical differences as well as actual instances of overlap between the social and the learner identity of students in a school context (Reay, 2010).

Tazmina had a reputation for doing style. On the day, she sported an artificial bun, and wore heavy earrings, with brightly done eyes and lips in the hues of black and pink. She was confident about her skills of doing style but expressed ambivalence about it when she said.

Style koribo pura paru. Moi tu olop besiye koru...beya kotha! Eman style koribo nalage. Ghorot thakile style nokoru

Here she expressed her sense of guilt about doing style which is reprimanded at school and home. For her, the space created in the company of her friends at school may be relatively safe and yet she sounded apologetic about it. This sense of guilt was indicative of how the code of modesty and appropriateness practiced on regular days did loom large and set limits to the practice of doing style. While the ability to do style was valued as a resource, the excess of style was fraught with the risk of earning a bad reputation.

Teachers at school are often viewed as the gatekeepers of the gender codes. Another student Hasina gave a clearer picture of how she negotiated the gendered code of dressing at school when she confessed that on this day she avoids coming in direct contact with the teachers. Though she managed to maintain distance from them she was anxious about her reputation in case of any sudden encounter.

Moi ma’am buror pora lukai dure dure thaku. Akou dekhile kobo suwali joni eman bhal nohoi kintu style kore

Her account presents the dilemma of a student who wants to indulge in style without undermining her reputation among teachers. She felt that it would have been easier if she was considered equally good in academics and in the skills of dressing up.

Contrary to her ideas, the two Muslim girls who enjoyed a higher academic reputation within the school had to make an extra effort to dress appropriately by modestly engaging in style. These girls were identified by the teachers as well as by their classmates as the ‘good’ girls.

Afreen was an Assamese-speaking Muslim, who tried to distinguish her style from her classmates

Moi style e nokoru, ekdom simple. Style mane lipstick nologau, okol eyeliner aru kajol he logau. Light kori logai jau. Dangor kaanfuli pindhu aru kom.

She had to indulge in doing ‘light’ and ‘simple’ style to maintain her academic reputation. Similarly, her friend Humaira held a high academic reputation in the class and also had to maintain a balance between peer-group expectations and her image as someone disinterested in style. Among her peers, she was seen as someone who would not dress up nicely. She eventually relented to the pressure when girls persuaded her to dress up in saree and apply light makeup for the puja.

These accounts suggest how they are trying to strike the right chord in their engagement with the school code of modesty while trying to live up to their academic and social reputation within peer group contexts. While academic status does matter in school, students with varied academic reputations do try to live up to their friends’ expectations as well. Peer group context set the alternative bases of evaluation which conflicted with adult norms of modesty valued in school. Girls’ friendship groups have been examined to suggest that these produce contradictory resources for them by reinforcing gender norms and providing a basis for effective cooperation (Borker, 2021; Dyson, 2010). In this school, we have seen girls’ attempts at transgressing the school code of femininity through friendship groups. But there are limits to such transgressions as girls did adhere to codes of femininity while constituting them differently and not in complete defiance of the school authority (Radhakrishnan, 2009). The engagement with these codes varied among girls. The average Miya girls tried to protect themselves by keeping away from the prying eyes of their teachers. The high achievers from the Assamese Muslim community indulged in lighter forms of style to maintain their academic reputation.

Finally, participation in the event called for a cautious navigation of the school space at multiple levels. As students, as girls invested in fashion and friendship, and, in the specific context of the celebration of puja in school, as Muslim girls. Therefore, while doing style was at the core of their participation in a Hindu festival, and invoked admiration from peers, it was fraught with risks. It was an exercise in which you risk the failure of ‘getting it all wrong’ (Skeggs, 1997). Getting it all wrong is an ever-present threat that besets the choices made by the girls. As we have seen what they wear not only risks being seen as inappropriate for the occasion, it might have real consequences for their academic reputation at school, and popularity among peers, in addition to them being labelled as bad Muslims.

Conclusion

Schools in India, both public and private, enforce a policy of a uniform dress code on all its students, which renders invisible the gendered practice of class, caste, and communitarian politics on matters of dressing up. The uniformity of appearance is often used by the school to enforce discipline among students with differential implications for those coming from working-class backgrounds and minority communities. We engaged in discourses and practice around the act of dressing up for Saraswati puja at school to understand how girls engage with codes of femininity. The examination of the gendered mode of participation of students in the festivity among Muslim girl students helped us sharpen our focus on the class, caste, and community-specific codes of appropriate femininity in Assam. The paper, through a focus on the dressing-up practice of Muslim girls, presents their precarious situation at school where they are faced with difficult choices to maintain their reputation before teachers, friends, and family members. It also illustrated how the normalisation of the celebration of majoritarian religious festivals in public spaces is growing alongside and facilitated through the wider engagement of youth in the consumption of fashion objects. At the same time, dressing up can also be used by the young generation in ways that articulate their conformity to and negotiation with majoritarian cultures. Feminist scholarship on girlhood and youth cultures suggests how girls’ practice of dressing up conveys the dual aspects of the act that may serve to reinforce codes of femininity while articulating specific subjective positions of ambivalence. These ambivalent positions are succinctly captured in the Muslim girls’ practice of doing style in this paper. While consumption of fashion objects such as saree and bindi during Puja veered towards legitimation of majoritarian cultures, it is in and through their engagement with doing style, that they find ways of navigating the same space.

Amidst contrary pressures of living up to the expectations of their peers while maintaining a reputation in school, Muslim girls make several attempts at reconciling their religious identity in ways that do not stand out from the rest of the girls, in redefining Saraswati Puja as an event that is relevant for them as students, and more importantly as girls who do style with friends. Ironically, given the larger politics of class, ethnicity, and aesthetic choices in matters of dressing up, often they do end up standing out from the rest, in the eyes of their teachers.