Against the backdrop of a rising Hindu majoritarianism and marked social and economic inequality, what does it mean to be a Muslim woman in India today?

This event marks the launch of Lexi Stadlen’s newly published Nine Paths which explores the intimate lives of nine women and their families on an island in the Sunderban, at the eastern edge of India, over the course of a year. There are weddings to celebrate and deaths to mourn, families to care for, difficult marriages to navigate and tragedies to overcome, as we observe the everyday drudgery, unexpected turmoil and the dreams of something better. A conversation chaired by Alpa Shah with Lexi Stadlen, sociologist Patricia Jeffrey who has conducted four decades of research in a Muslim village in Uttar Pradesh and journalist Sonia Faleiro who most recently wrote the The Good Girls, the ordinary killing of two low caste girls in a village in Uttar Pradesh.

Meet our speakers and chair

Sonia Faleiro (@soniafaleiro) is an award winning journalist and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, praised by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, New York Times and Financial Times.

Patricia Jeffery, the author of many books and articles on India, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of Edinburgh and is finalising a manuscript on the transitions of ordinary life in a Muslim village in Uttar Pradesh over more than forty years.

Lexi Stadlen has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and won the 2019 Bayly Prize, awarded by the Royal Asiatic Society for an outstanding thesis on an Asian topic completed at a British University. 

Alpa Shah (@alpashah001) is the author of Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the New India Book Foundation Prize and winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize. She is Professor of Anthropology and Convenor of the ‘Global Economies of Care’ research theme at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE.

More about this event

LSE Anthropology (@LSEAnthropology) is world famous and world leading. Our work is based on ethnographic research: detailed studies of societies and communities in which we have immersed ourselves via long term fieldwork. Placing the everyday lives and meanings of ordinary people - whoever and wherever they are - at the heart of the discipline, we take nothing for granted.

The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many of the School's departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

You can order the book Nine Paths: what it means to be a minority woman in a majoritarian state (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSENinePaths