Dr. Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil is an Ansari Institute Global Fellow who recently completed his PhD at the University of Hyderabad, India. His doctoral thesis, titled “Islam, State, and Sovereignty: Genealogy of Muslim Subject Formation in Malabar,” traces the minoritization of Muslims in India, examining Muslim engagements with state, sovereignty, and law in the colonial and postcolonial contexts in South India. He was formerly a COMPOSE Fellow (2025) at Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia, a DAAD PhD Visiting Fellow (2022) at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, and an Erasmus Fellow (2021) at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor at SRM University-AP, India. His areas of research interest include Islam, sovereignty, governmentality, religion, state, and minority discourses. He is presently working on his first monograph, tentatively titled Formations of Minority: Afterlives of Law, Governance, and Colonial Sovereignty in India.
Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background, and how you ended up here today.
I come from Malappuram district in Kerala, India. I did my primary schooling nearby, and the medium of instruction was Malayalam, my native language. As almost everybody in the area did, I also attended a madrasa, which provided me with customary religious training. Later, I moved to an English-medium school. Until I finished school, my ambition was to become an astrophysicist. But during my higher secondary years, my orientation completely changed. I became interested in writing and journalism, which pushed me to pursue a bachelor’s in English literature, with audiovisual communication and journalism as complementary courses. I also started writing for some small magazines and local newspapers.
After my graduation, I moved to Hyderabad. It was the first time I left my district for education, and that was a major turning point in my academic life. I joined the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, where I completed my Master’s in English, specializing in cultural studies. During this period, I was introduced to different aspects of English literature and cultural studies: the possibilities of language and writing, the scope of literature beyond classical texts, and the importance of studying culture. I started reading literary texts as a way of understanding society, power, and history. Also, it was the first time I got introduced to research. Until then, I did not really know what research meant.
During my Master’s, I became more curious about studying my own community, Muslims. So, I started working on short pieces, in which I tried to explore the questions about Muslim subjectivity. I also became concerned with the social aspects of caste and religion. At the same time, I was active in student politics, engaging in community empowerment with anti-caste and anti-racist orientations. In the Indian context, as you know, caste often works as a racialized structure, making these engagements closely connected to my academic interests.
These interests developed into my MPhil research at the University of Hyderabad, in which I analyzed a Malayalam newspaper called Madhyamam, run by a Muslim group in Kerala. I studied the period between 1987 and 1993 to understand how Madhyamam imagines Muslim subjectivity. This period is important because it coincides with major events in Indian Muslim history, particularly the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, formation of new Muslim movements, and new forms of community articulations.
After my MPhil, taking the questions of Muslim subjectivity forward, I briefly joined a research project on ‘egalitarianism’ at Manipal University in collaboration with the University of Bergen in Norway. Although my participation in the project was brief, it introduced me to social anthropology, which later became very important to my thinking.
I then returned to the University of Hyderabad for my PhD. I was affiliated with the Centre for Comparative Literature, and it gave me the opportunity to do interdisciplinary work, moving across different fields: cultural history, political theory, religious studies, and political theology. Initially, my research focused on the formation of new Muslim movements, and changes in their articulation, after the Babri Masjid demolition. A noticeable example is the change in the names of the organization before and after 1992, from having explicitly Islamic names to increasingly adopting a secular and constitutional pattern in naming. Likewise, citizenship rights became a central anchoring point of Muslim articulations.
At first, I approached this as a contemporary change and primarily a question of language. But as I worked further, I realized that this mode of articulating Muslim politics is not contemporary, and it involves a deeper question of how the Muslim community was engaging with the state. We see a similar mode of articulating Muslim politics in the 1930s during nationalist struggles and the Indian Constituent Assembly, when the Muslim community was engaging with the British state and the emergent Indian nation-state.
I understood that the ‘rights question’ was not something new; it was always already there. I began to see my primary question: how the Muslim community engages with power and the state, in different contexts?
This realization made me rethink my entire project.
This was in the third year of my PhD. I began tracing this engagement historically, moving back to the colonial and even pre-colonial periods. I was becoming a sort of historian, a cultural historian!! I looked at how Muslim communities in regions like Malabar interacted with different colonial powers – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British – and later with nationalist and postcolonial state formations. What became clear is that during the pre-colonial period, Muslim communities exercised certain forms of sovereignty. With colonial rule, especially under the British, this relationship changed fundamentally. Sovereignty was reorganized, and Muslim engagement with local rulers got reshuffled.
The British also intervened in the Muslim networks with the Ottoman Caliphate, which gradually led to what I understand as the emergence of Muslim nationalism. Consequently, Muslims increasingly came to be governed as minorities. So, the central focus of my PhD was to trace this transformation of Muslims from being a community with forms of sovereignty to a community governed as a minority. In other words, it is to understand the genealogy of Muslim subject formation. Now, I would confidently argue that the post-1990s turn toward secular and constitutional language is part of this longer historical process of minoritization.
The project and questions kept expanding and changing. To move through different disciplines and to trace this longer history, I needed time. I took 8 years to finish my PhD! During this period, I also spent a year in Germany on a fellowship. That was extremely important for me. It gave me distance from the field and the space to reflect and write, and it helped me refine the overall direction of the research.
What do you hope to accomplish in the next year as a Global Fellow, and how do you think being part of an international cohort will help you?
I want to develop my thesis into a book. The thesis is quite long; more than 400 pages! I do not want it to remain only as a thesis. When I started thinking about turning it into a book, I realized it needs serious reworking to narrow the focus, bring in more post-Indian-state-formation debates to tighten the argument, rethink the structure, and sharpen the conceptual focus.
It was during this time that I saw the call for the Ansari Institute Global Fellows program. What attracted me was also the mentorship aspect. Getting feedback from scholars outside my immediate academic context is very important for this project, especially because my work sits at the intersection of literature, religious studies, history, and political theory. I am fortunate to have been selected for this fellowship.
Being part of an international cohort is also extremely useful. Although my research is grounded in South India, the questions I am dealing with, such as minority formation, colonialism and nationalism, sovereignty and governance, are not limited to Indian contexts. Engaging with scholars working on different contexts is helping me clarify what is specific about my case and what speaks to a broader global audience.
So, for me, this fellowship year is really a space to pause and consolidate the years of work I have already done. It is time to rethink the project more carefully and gradually transform the thesis into a book. That’s my hope.