Nitish Kumar made headlines for unveiling a Muslim woman at a public gathering. A week earlier, a supply officer filmed niqabi women despite their resistance and circulated the footage on Facebook. Agents of Israeli occupiers clicked photographs of themselves posing in the undergarments of displaced Palestinian women after raiding their homes. The fantasy of possessing the Muslim woman’s body is evident in the psyche of the coloniser. For him, the Muslim woman is a site of inaccessible information which he feels entitled to know, grasp, and possess. Behind the veil lies everything that has been denied access—everything that refuses to be known, manipulated, and publicised.
The liberal modern world imagines freedom as naked, visible, transparent, and accessible. The Muslim woman, as Fanon noted, sees without being seen. The veil thus becomes the very barrier that frustrates the coloniser’s fantasy. It is not the woman’s freedom that the agents of unveiling seek, but their own. The Muslim woman is reduced to a freedom-granting object for an ever-curious and pervasive imperial, colonial, and majoritarian gaze.
When I started practising hijab in 2021, I was met with remarks like “jihadi” and “talibani” from a swarm of boys while walking to class. Friends and their parents asked the same question that characterises the experience of almost every hijabi woman: who is forcing you? A friend’s mother asked if I had started loving my Lord overnight. Another asked me to stop wearing it because I did not look like one of them. I comforted myself by telling myself that perhaps these comments owed to the majoritarian-coded atmosphere of North India. I thought moving to a new city would be a good alternative.
I went to Hyderabad for my master’s. During my university days, a certain left party would issue timely reminders dressed up as statements in which my faith was always translated as fundamentalist, my veil dismissed as barbaric, and my community rendered uncivilised. Not that it mattered to me anymore; I had already been immunised through first-hand experience. Nor did it deserve much attention, since such statements merely echoed their own hollowness. But they sell well, because they align neatly with the modernist idea of progress.
I shifted my attention to academics. After qualifying for two national-level examinations, I strategically began applying for jobs. International schools, known for their inclusivity, instead of asking about my skills and expertise, began with:
“Ma’am, do you wear hijab?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Can you remove this for the job?”
“Sorry, I can’t.”
This became the usual conversation, after which I never heard back. Eventually, I began informing recruiters about my hijab in advance, only for interview invitations to be revoked immediately. The so-called alternative merely shifted the violence from verbal comments to bureaucratic exclusion.
Across the political spectrum, the world invests heavily in seeing me unveiled. The fashion and entertainment industries do this work religiously. They show me how it would look if I were just a little more unveiled, a more illuminated and fancifully decorated version of myself. The job market offers more opportunities if I choose to unveil. The coloniser who pervades my screen is always busy selling me an unveiled image of myself. Through clips and bytes, the algorithm attempts to engineer micro-shifts in my choices, punishing me with shadow bans for non-compliance. It inculcates the fear of being backward, stuck in the Stone Age, paints me as a mute spectator without agency, and infantilises my faith. The modesty-shaming never ends.
Majoritarian coercion is more direct. They force me into the liberation of unveiling. They threaten to bar me from examinations. Yet when I do sit for them, pass, and earn certificates through years of hard work, they unveil me at the very moment that was meant to be my victory.
I am punished by this liberation by liberals and majoritarians alike. In his self-professed entitlement to experience the world naked, the very image of a veil unsettles him, reminding him of limits in an all-accessible world. For the Hindu majoritarian, the desire to possess me unveiled is driven by a need to police the community and wreak havoc in its collective consciousness. Unveiling me allows him to realise himself as a true adherent of Hindu nationalism or a loyalist to liberal modernity.
Those who support my unveiling from the hands of my oppressor justify it by transforming him into a father figure—caring, protective, helping his daughter claim dignity and freedom. The father-turned-oppressor thus assumes the role of my secular patriarchal benefactor. Having attained the right to unveil me without my consent, he performs this duty religiously and even finds it necessary to “free” me, to protect me from the men of my community, by lynching them to death.
The spectator then underwrites the same old logic of dignity and freedom. The violence is double-faceted, as the spectator repeats the script while refusing to question the assumptions on which my dignity is imagined. For him, freedom and dignity are saleable items which can be bought in exchange for the veil. His mind is perfectly caged; For him, the veil is coercion by default, while coercing its removal is recorded as liberation.
My voice, needless to say, is unwelcome in this business of liberation, because confronting it would require meeting the hollowness of the questioner. The smiles, comfort, and applause that accompany unveiling reek of the “heroism” of narrating an adventure tale, as Sarah Ghumkhor notes.
Edward Said reminds us that the image has the potential to satisfy the thirst for meaning. The spectacle of unveiling simultaneously quenches the thirst of the Hindu majoritarian and the liberal who imposes a mono-modernist subjectivity—one that aligns seamlessly with majoritarian sentiment in India and is sold, marketed, and coerced as the default mode of being.
This anxiety to cross the boundary of the veil is not new. It is kneaded into the socio-political order; it is historical, felt across societies and centuries. I think of colonial Algeria, where French officials organised public unveiling ceremonies of Algerian women under the language of emancipation. Posters from the period urged women to “unveil yourself—are you not beautiful?” and “unveil yourself—be a woman like all others.” Unveiling was staged as an entry into womanhood itself. The veiled woman appeared as an anomaly to be corrected. These ceremonies did not secure freedom for the woman; they secured freedom for the coloniser—the freedom to see, to access, to complete the scene of domination.
The frustration of accessing the inaccessible has only intensified. The image of unveiling thus operates as a form of symbolic revenge. Even when the veil remains intact, mere proximity to the veiled woman does the work. By making the veil public, the desire to see is symbolically satisfied, even without literal removal.
Unveiling has been so deeply internalised in the coloniser’s psyche that my humanisation cannot be performed without it. The recognition of my humanity presupposes that my choice be violated, my privacy intruded upon, and that I unveil further to be considered more human. This logic reinforces colonial narratives of the veil as oppressive and infantilises me as a woman, assuming that I will always be brainwashed by the men of my community unless I submit to majoritarian desire.
Byung-Chul Han writes that utter illumination promises maximal gain. The economic gain in the hyper-illumination of the Muslim woman is second only to the ideological gain of coercing her into liberation. In the name of Muslim women’s rights, the state minimises liberal dissent while satisfying the right’s desire to possess my body and realise the Hindu nation through violence against my body.
Han further warns that the heroic project of transparency—tearing down veils, driving away darkness—leads to violence. That violence is borne, again and again, by Muslim women: when we are filmed veiled, unveiled in public ceremonies, excluded in the name of inclusion, or forced into symbolic exposure. It does not end with filming, unveiling, or lynching our men. It does not end when our homes are raided or when we are killed. Even in death, they possess our undergarments and pose with them as trophies of conquering the inaccessible.
And so, I, along with other veiled women, do not ask for better analyses of our condition or more interviews about how we feel. We have been analysed enough, interpreted enough, illuminated enough. Every attempt to “understand” us has only rehearsed the same entitlement to access, the same demand that we make ourselves legible on terms not our own.
We ask to be left alone behind our veil.
Stop doing our math for us. Stop translating our choices into your moral vocabulary. Stop decorating coercion as liberation simply because it wears the language of progress. Ask instead what kind of freedom needs a woman’s consent to be violated in order to prove itself.
If, in your imagination, dignity can only arrive once the veil is gone and freedom is imagined naked, then the poverty is not ours. It is yours.
Aatifa Ikram Khan is an independent researcher based in India. She is interested in media coloniality.
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