Assamese Muslim, AMU, America, and Global & Local Islamophobia | Prof. Yasmin Saikia
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.
