Gatekeepers (or the Anti-Muslim Politics of Help)

In chapter seven, Shankar follows one of the Sahaayaka mentors as he moves through an Urdu medium school in South Karnataka. Shankar reveals the way that Sahaayaka's organizational ideology, which limits any explicit focus on a specific minority community, results in a praxis that largely invisibilizes the needs of majority Muslim schools. In turn, the fieldworkers deploy racist anti-Muslim ideologies in how they characterize the capacities of Muslim students.