Ghazal Asif Farrukhi

Home institution

Lahore University of Management Sciences

Research project

Hindu Intimacies and the Muslim State in Pakistan

This project explores the desires, domestic lives, and intimate relationships of Hindu women in Muslim majority Pakistan. It examines how the state works to transform religious others into minority citizens by policing women’s sexuality and their maintenance of kinship relations, as well as how Hindu women navigate ritual, devotional, and social boundaries in such an environment.

Profile

Ghazal Asif Farrukhi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology with affiliation to the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Lahore University of Management Sciences University. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Her current book manuscript interweaves ethnography with legal and literary texts, newspaper and state archives, and oral histories. Centering Hindu and Dalit communities in Sindh, Pakistan, it focuses on how women navigate ritual, devotional, and social boundaries while constituting the interface for the state-led reform of religiously minoritized communities. 

Ghazal’s research interests broadly include secularism, Hinduism, and Islam; domesticity, kinship, and sexuality; and postcolonial regimes of citizenship and governance. A second project on the politics of caste emancipation in Pakistan considers how caste and religion are reproduced and contested as categories of knowledge, and how people imagine alternative political possibilities from marginalized positions. 

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), and Journal of South Asian Studies. Her scholarship has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, LUMS, and Johns Hopkins.

Course

HDS 3556: Women, Gender, and Religious Citizenship in South Asia (Spring 2025)