This chapter traces the meaning-making attempts of the Shia religious minority within the larger Muslim community in modern India. I use select periods between the early 20th and early 21st centuries to show how elites use discursive strategies to present their collective self as a distinct and remarkable religious minority in need of protection and promotion. These discursive strategies primarily use word-acts such as petitions, speeches, arguments, and counterarguments through which the Shia perform their distinction in public. Shias claim distinction from the larger Muslim community, which was being labeled negatively. Across these periods, the Shia present themselves in positive light by projecting loyalty toward the British Crown prior to the nationalist movement, by claiming a nationalist position in contrast to the Indian Muslim League during the freedom movement, and by fashioning themselves in the image of the desirable citizen, distinct from both orthodox Sunni Muslims, and opposed to terrorism in the context of Islamophobia. The shifting content in their collective identities correspond with the dominant discourse of the public sphere as the terms of debate change with shifting statecraft, national discourse, and local politics.

Drawing upon archival material, and interviews conducted during 2012– 13, I study shifting religious identity by bringing concepts from three lines of enquiry into conversation with each other. These include Erving Goffman's work on stigmatized identity and performance of the self (Goffmann, 1961, 1963), the public sphere, and Michele Lamont's boundary-making framework (Lamont, 2008; Lamont and Molnár, 2002). I demonstrate how the Shia perform their collective self in public while the public works as a neutral arena and as an actor in varying contexts. I extend the boundary-making framework such that it works not only with the binary of the self and the other, but also with a triangular dynamic of the self, the other, and the public. I argue that the public sphere is not simply an arena, but an actor that actively shapes the collective identity of politically insignificant minority groups, which must adjust their particularities under its identity-blind universalizing requirements.

I combine methods and theories for a multipronged approach to make sense of my materials as this interpretive strategy allows me to go beyond the ways in which scholarship on Indian Shias has been done in the past.