Community-Based Marking and Minority Schooling Experiences in Urban Pakistan

Abstract

This study explores how community-based marking affects the school experiences of Christian, Hindu, and Sikh minority students in urban Pakistan. The analysis treats community-based marking as a racializing process: descent, religion, and inherited occupational association together fix group position as natural, heritable, and unalterable by individual achievement in a setting where phenotype is not the principal basis of classification. The study draws on thirty-eight semi-structured interviews at two purposively selected urban sites and uses social marking theory to compare how community identity is inherited and how that inheritance shapes educational experience across three minority groups. The study included thirteen Christian, thirteen Hindu, and twelve Sikh participants. Student and young adult accounts (n = 20) form the core evidence; parents, teachers, and community leaders provide contextual and institutional perspectives. Five structurally analogous patterns emerged across communities: 1) inherited community-based marking that functions regardless of individual family background through descent–occupation stigma for Christian students and religion-linked attribution for Hindu and Sikh students; 2) adult non-intervention and institutional silence; 3) peer social distancing enacted through spatial practices; 4) normalized exclusion, in which students know of exclusionary boundaries but adjust their daily practices to avoid them because credible institutional alternatives are lacking; and 5) the use of education as a constrained response strategy. The findings rest on interpersonal and discursive evidence from students who persisted in education at two urban sites. By specifying how racial boundaries are produced and reproduced without phenotype, the study extends comparative racialization scholarship beyond the Western racial binary and identifies the school as an ordinary institutional site of racial formation.