On the morning of Eid, the city seems to rearrange itself. The light is softer, or perhaps it only feels that way. White kurtas catch the early sun, the faint trace of ittar lingers in the air, and narrow streets that usually rush with impatience slow into something more deliberate. But the transformation begins the night before. On chaand raat, markets stay awake longer than usual, glowing under strings of uneven lights. Stalls spill over with bangles, embroidered kurtas, caps, sewai and last-minute purchases.
By morning, that restlessness settles into something quieter. Outside mosques and in open grounds, rows begin to form. There is a stillness just before the prayer begins, a pause that holds both anticipation and familiarity. Then, almost all at once, bodies move in unison. The prayer unfolds, rhythmic and collective. Strangers stand shoulder to shoulder, momentarily bound by a shared act. For a brief time, the individual dissolves into the community. As Benedict Anderson wrote, communities are “imagined” — held together by the idea of belonging, even among strangers.
It is a scene of joy, of faith, of continuity. But it is also something else. It is a moment of visibility for the ‘imagined community’. To gather is to be seen — and in today’s India, to be seen is to be interpreted.
Eid, in contemporary India, exists at this intersection. It is not only a religious festival or a cultural celebration. It is also a public expression of identity, one that carries meaning beyond the act itself. The very visibility that gives Eid its collective warmth also places it within a wider field of interpretation, where identity is noticed, understood, and sometimes questioned.
When practice becomes visibility
Religious identity is not just privately held; it is lived through practice. Talal Asad sees traditions like Islam as living practices shaped through everyday rituals and actions. Through these practices, individuals experience and embody their faith in daily life. Saba Mahmood argues in Politics of Piety that agency is not only about resistance but can exist within following norms. In this sense, gestures of religious life are not merely expressive but formative.
Erving Goffman has suggested, social life is, in many ways, a performance — shaped by context and by the awareness of being seen. In such a setting, visibility is never neutral. It shapes not just how others see a community, but how that community understands itself.
Visibility recognised is identity
At the same time, identity is shaped not just from within, but through how others recognise us in public life. As Charles Taylor suggests, recognition plays a key role in forming one’s sense of self. Great postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon adds that identity often develops under an ‘external gaze’, not always on one’s own terms. In such conditions, the experience of expressing and being seen is not neutral. It structures how the self is formed and understood. The question of identity, then, is not only about recognition but about the terms on which one appears in public life.
Faith under scrutiny
Seen in this line, Eid for Indian Muslims becomes more than a festival. The prayer, the clothing, the greetings, the rituals of charity and hospitality, all of these are symbolic gestures, but not merely that. They are ways of asserting belonging, of appearing in public as one is, and of holding on to identity in a space where it is constantly being read.
In recent years, questions around religious expression, public space, and minority identity in India have become more pronounced. Visibility, in such a climate, can feel layered. It is at once an affirmation of presence and an exposure to scrutiny. From restrictions on public prayers in Noida and Gurugram to demolitions in places like Jahangirpuri, Mehrauli and Khargone, spaces of belonging have increasingly become sites of anxiety. On Eid, congregations continue to assemble, returning again to shared spaces, carrying with them not only faith but a quiet insistence on presence.
Heavy police presence and circulating anxieties lend the celebrations a quieter, more guarded atmosphere in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar. Disruption to Eid prayers in Uttar Pradesh’s Kurawali also reflects afresh how routine acts of worship become entangled in questions of legality, space, and control. Yet, markets bustle and mosques fill, declaring a continuous engagement with an atmosphere at sixes and sevens.
This act does not always take the form of overt confrontation. Often, it is more subtle. It exists in the awareness of being watched, in the knowledge that identity, when made visible, enters into a field of interpretation that is not entirely within one’s control. The act of gathering for prayer, of occupying space collectively, can thus carry a quiet tension. Not enough to overshadow the joy of the festival, but enough to be felt. It is here that Eid takes on an additional significance. Not merely as an act of protest, but as an act of continuity.
Not resistance, but refusal to disappear
To celebrate, in such circumstances, is to insist on the ordinary. It is to refuse the idea that identity must retreat into the private sphere to remain unchallenged. It is to affirm that belonging is not conditional on invisibility. There is a quiet dignity in this. A steadiness that does not always seek confrontation but does not yield presence either.
This distinction matters. To frame Eid as resistance alone would be to narrow its meaning. The festival is not defined by opposition. It is defined by faith, by gratitude, by generosity. But it is precisely in today’s India, in the act of living out these values publicly that a form of assertion emerges. Not loud, not declarative, but persistent. It makes identity visible, not as a claim to be argued, but as a reality to be lived.
This is also why attempts to draw a strict line between the personal and the public often fall short.
Practices that appear personal are, in fact, deeply social, assertive, and political. They shape how individuals see themselves and how they are seen by others. Eid exists precisely in this overlap. It is both intimate and collective, both personal and public.
In a society as diverse as India, such dynamics are not unique to any one community. Every group negotiates its visibility in different ways. Festivals, in this sense, are moments when identity becomes visible, when difference is not only present but expressed. They contribute to the texture of public life, to the plurality that defines the social landscape Indians live in.
The question, then, is not whether identities should be visible, but how that visibility is received. Whether it is met with recognition or discomfort, with acceptance or suspicion. Eid, in its quiet way, raises this question without explicitly asking it. To step out on Eid morning, to join the prayer, to greet another with Eid Mubarak, is to participate in this process. It is to take part in the ongoing work of identity, one that is shaped not only by discourse and debate, but by everyday acts of presence.
Eid does not announce itself as political. Yet, in being lived publicly, it inevitably becomes so — not through confrontation, but through continuity. Not through resistance, but through the refusal to disappear.
In today’s India, that quiet insistence on being seen may be its most powerful act.
Eid prayers, seen — and read — through the gaze of the city. (Image generated via AI/Canva) 
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