Assamese Muslim, AMU, America, and Global & Local Islamophobia |

In this episode of Nous Podcast, we speak with Dr. Yasmin Saikia, historian of South Asia and peace scholar, whose work examines memory, erasure, and the ethics of belonging. Reflecting on her personal and intellectual journey from Assam to Aligarh to American academia, she unpacks the condition of Assamese Muslims, especially those stigmatised as Miya, as one of profound ethical and historical loneliness.

We explore how language, religion, region, and race intersect to render Muslims in Assam not only socially marginal but historically illegible as orphans of a past that refuses to claim them, and a present that continually casts them as the “other.”

Drawing on Dr. Saikia’s broader engagement with Muslim suffering, silence, and subjectivity, from partition to post-9/11 America, this conversation asks urgent, uncomfortable questions.
It's a global story about Muslims, modernity, and the politics of invisibility. It is also a deeply personal one, of how the Miya Muslim, the Indian Muslim, the American Muslim, are shaped by overlapping structures of exclusion across time and place.

#Assam #MiyaMuslims #MuslimIdentity #HistoricalMemory #SouthAsia #DecolonizeHistory #InvisibleHistories #IndianMuslims #PostcolonialStudies #Islamophobia #MuslimHeritage #BlackMuslims

00:00 - Teaser
02:25 - Introduction
5:34 – Personal Journey: Grappling with Identity, Belonging & Islamophobia
10:19 – Student Years at AMU: Formative Encounters
18:53 – Sir Syed’s Vision: Legacy, Modernity & Muslim Education
24:28 – From Assam to AMU: Navigating Regional and Religious Identity
31:28 – AMU as a Minority Institution: Between Muslim Culture & Indian Pluralism
47:51 – Inside U.S. Academia: A Muslim Scholar's Perspective
52:20 – Reclaiming Assamese History: Tai Ahom Identity and Beyond
01:01:13 – The Shaping of Assamese Identity: Partition and Its Aftermath
01:06:21 – Mapping Culture: Bengali-Assamese Geographies and Divergences
01:08:45 – Language or Religion? RSS and the Politicisation of the Assamese-Bengali Divide
01:22:26 – Muslims in Assam: Layers of Otherisation
01:42:18 – The Global Muslim Experience: Alienation and Belonging
02:08:27 – Western Academia and the Muslim Stereotype: Complicity or Critique?
02:13:39 – Are Islamic Values Incompatible with the West? Debating the Binary
02:21:30 – Building the Centre for Muslim Experience: Confronting Internal & External Crises
02:20:38 – Rethinking Identity: Possibilities Beyond the Crisis