Knots in the Weave: Female Friendship, Ritual Tension, and the Religious Other

In a sewing class on the premises of a Hindu temple in small-town Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim girls met every day to learn to sew together. The class was held together as a collective space by female friendship arising from shared interests and neighborly ties. In an asymmetrical religious milieu laden with recent histories of violence, ordinary interactions could be poisoned by the past, but they also enabled alternative possibilities of inter-religious friendships. This paper attends to the management of inter-religious ritual tensions and elaborate forms of aversion by young women grasping for language to parry what they understood as religious difference, as well as to find some ritual common ground with one another. I show how their commitment to maintaining and repairing relations with one another relied on shared, gendered norms and comportments that could bear some transgressions and failures but could also come apart easily.