| Summary/Abstract |
Hindu nationalist discourse articulates a link between the violence of slaughter and the notion of a violent, abject Muslim as the cruel ‘other’. However, for Muslims in Mumbai, the cruelty of slaughter is not inherent, and questions of order and propriety are heavily circumscribed by communal politics. This paper presents moments during Bakri Id (Qurbani) and everyday life when participants evoke or experience disgust. Drawing on a discursive tradition of slaughter, together with everyday observations on infrastructure, order and marginalisation by middle-class Muslims from various walks of life, focuses attention on the way disgust is and is not experienced by Muslims in the city. I argue that these instances of disgust are moments of embodied critique that secure the middle-class Muslim as subject by pointing to the histories of marginalisation, infrastructural neglect and improper religious practice.
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