It is to live at an intersection the nation would rather not notice. Muslims constitute 14.2% of India's population, as per the 2011 Census. The Other Backward Classes, scattered across religions, compose about 45%, although the state has never given exact figures. Between the two groups, there is a huge, unmapped group: Muslim OBCs. They are present in policy, in localities, in college campuses, but not usually in the conversation.
I was brought up in Kerala, which has 26.56% Muslims. The Kerala of my time believed in impossible secularism. Religion was a part of life, but never the edge. I attended school with friends of all religions, ate cross-dietary food, and enjoyed Onam with the same fervour as Eid. The term caste was heard from me only in school books, not in talks. It seemed as if we had managed to leap past India's strict hierarchies.
That came crashing down when I left home.
When I joined NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad, I entered a world that treated “merit” like a moral virtue. I had made it through the OBC quota, and that detail lingered in my head—not because I doubted the reservation, but because of how others saw it. I have never believed that reservation is charity; it is a constitutional right born out of centuries of structural violence. Yet, in an environment where the savarna myth of “meritocracy” circulates as common sense, I found myself wrestling with an unease that wasn’t truly mine. It wasn’t shame for using a right—it was the exhaustion of having to justify it in spaces built to make you feel undeserving.
Reality on the campus was telling. Fewer than five per cent of students were Muslims. OBCs were nowhere to be seen, consumed by the omnipresent mythology of "diversity achieved." In canteens and classrooms, offhand remarks regarding reservation passed effortlessly, enfolded in jokes about "backdoor entries" or "low ranks." Nobody intended harm; that was the issue. People's ease was rooted in never having to consider structural advantage.
To me, identity was something to hide and to defend simultaneously. I avoided disclosing how I gained entry, even while having strong views on affirmative action. It's weird how internalised caste and religious inferiority function: they school you in the intellectual defence of your being while emotionally apologising for it.
There was one such event—a lecture by a Muslim scholar. I went out of duty, not enthusiasm. It seemed like there were too few of us, and that our presence at such places somehow "represented" our entire community. Savarna secularism granted others the privilege of indifference. For them, going wasn't political; for me, staying away felt like betrayal.
Then came the Muzaffarnagar classroom incident. The video of a Muslim boy being slapped repeatedly by his classmates under the instructions of a Hindu teacher went viral. “Kya tum maar rahe ho? Zor se maaro na,” she said—words that burned into the nation’s conscience for a day before being forgotten. Watching it, I felt something snap. The violence wasn’t exceptional; it was pedagogy. This is how the Indian classroom teaches its citizens—through humiliation selectively applied.
The following day, I wore a hijab to class. It was not a religious epiphany but a statement. A refusal to fit in, to do secular erasure for convenience. In that gesture, I learned the politics of visibility: for some, it's optional; for others, it's survival.
It is to be Muslim OBC to live in the interstices of all political imagining. Dalit politics, formed through Ambedkarite assertion, doesn't often speak for us. Upper-caste Muslim politics trivialises caste as a Hindu issue. Savarna feminism ignores us completely. The outcome is a palimpsest of invisibility. We are not "marginalised enough" to deserve state notice, nor "mainstream enough" to be represented.
Reports have attempted to identify this lack. The Sachar Committee Report (2006) made it clear that Muslims as a whole have lower employment and literacy levels than the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in several states. The OBC Muslims—invariably named such as Ansaris, Qureshis, and so on—suffer the dual exclusion of caste and religion. The Ranganath Misra Commission (2007) subsequently suggested that Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians should be accorded Scheduled Caste status, noting the reality of caste cutting across religions. Successive governments shelved it quietly.
In university spaces, representation is a reflection of this disregard. Even with the 27% OBC reservation required in central universities, the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE 2021-22) figures indicate that Muslim enrollment is still disproportionately low. Even among that figure, the presence of OBC Muslims is a fraction of a fraction—rarely ever surveyed independently. There are no official figures for Muslim OBC academics in central universities. The state numbers us enough to place into categories, but not enough to care.
Class complicates this even more. Several Muslim OBC families, such as mine, have experienced limited upward mobility through education or Gulf migration. But caste does not loosen with income—it's sticky. Social respectability continues to elude you. You may be earning more, but you still have to know your place. I've watched educated OBC Muslims perform class to cover over caste, to posture about belonging in liberal groups that pat themselves on the back for secularism but refuse to unlearn privilege.
Occasionally, I find myself thinking of Kerala once more—the reassuring myth of its secular harmony. Communal violence is indeed less common there, but no more does not mean that caste has disappeared. It has merely become polite, coded, and concealed in language that happens to be progressive. Muslim elite there, usually Ashraf in origin, control institutions and religious leadership, while OBC and Pasmanda Muslims are peripheral. We are the workers who constructed the Gulf remittance economy and the students who creep into universities quietly through reserved quotas, with unspoken shame.
Reservation permitted me to enter law school, but not to belong. Kerala permitted secularism, but not caste abolition. India permitted constitutional rights, but not social equality. Every identity I possess—Muslim, OBC, woman, student—clashes with another, requiring translation.
To be a Muslim OBC in India is to be in perpetual explanation mode: to Hindus who believe caste goes away with conversion, to upper-caste Muslims who refuse to accept it, to liberals who believe that mentioning caste splits the secular front. It is to live in a nation that is fixated on numbering everyone except you.
Until the state acknowledges Muslim OBCs as a political and social category in and of themselves, and until secular imagination comes to accept that caste is more than religion, we shall remain invisible—too Muslim for caste politics, too backward for secularism, and too inconvenient for data.
But invisibility is not the same as absence. Each hijab donned in resistance, each quota seat won with no regrets, each word that shatters the silence of "we don't have caste in Islam" is proof that we are here—and that our history should be heard.