Abstract
This book is a wonderful exposition of dargah culture in contemporary South Asia. It uses as its case study the constellation of shrines, known as Husain Tekri, in the Jaora area of Madhya Pradesh. This conglomeration is built to commemorate the memory of the martyrs of Karbala. The buildings contain silver miniatures of the tombs of the Prophet’s grandson Husain, and that of Abbas and Ali. They also have replicas of tombs of other relatives of the Prophet: Bibi Fatima, Bibi Zaineb and Bibi Sakina. The managers of this overtly Shia space are Sunni descendants of the former Muslim princely state of Jaora. Pilgrims visit the shrine seeking healing of physical and mental illnesses as well as solutions to financial and familial problems.
Bellamy uses pilgrim narratives, local histories and pamphlets in Urdu and Hindi to reconstruct the ritual life at the site and its integration into the domestic space of pilgrims. She argues that Husain Tikri’s everyday rituals derive from Islamicate court culture. The ritual of haziri and that of petitioning for justice to the saint corresponds to the royal ritual of haziri or the physical presence of the individual seeking justice in a regal court. This mirroring of the court culture in the shrine’s rituals projects the saint as the fulcrum of temporal power. However, the invocation of the universalist referents of Islam, like the martyrs of Karbala, and the use of the Islamicate court rituals do not dilute the particularistic veneer of Husain Tikri. Indeed, these universalist referents connect Husain Tikri to other local Sufi sites and regional sacred spaces that follow similar court-derived rituals. Such shared rituals produce a network of non-sectarian contacts between pilgrims who visit the entire sacred range. Bellamy argues that these connected shrines, of different hues, indicate the presence of a truly South Asian dargah culture that is both local and cosmopolitan. Its authority and legitimacy is diffused and lateral, extending beyond the borders of South Asia. According to her, the pilgrims experience Husain Tikri’s ambiguity, and notice the cultural differences and fault lines as they straddle the constellation of shrines. They view the universalist strands played out in local flavours. Their religious identity and sense of self is shaped by both the universal and the local referents. More importantly, the shrine’s ambivalence colours their individual illness narratives and defines for them its healing prowess.
An important contribution of the book is its effort to break the boundaries of the sacred and the domestic, and reveals the porous borders between the liminal and the everyday life. Bellamy offers a delightful in-house view of everyday religious practice that derives from Husain Tikri but is performed at home, and in villages and towns far away from it. She argues that this long arm of Husain Tikri makes the South Asian dargah culture a unique experience.
This malleable frame of Husain Tikri is a refreshing entry point to rethink dargah culture as integral to the everyday rhythms of society and not as a cordoned off sacred space of significance. The location of South Asian dargahs in this wider social and political ambit offers a more complex understanding of religious identity and inter-sectarian and religious relations than those offered by studies more interested in looking at hierarchies of power at the site and the social relations that derive from it.
Gift exchange, associated with the Islamicate courts, is the pivot around which Bellamy offers a riveting description of healing at Husain Tikri. Her ethnographically rich survey of ailing pilgrims and self-participation in the healing process forefronts the cultural and therapeutic significance of the essence—loban—that is used to cure the ill. She views loban as a gift that is both received at the shrine and used on the pilgrims as therapy. If this echoes the court rituals of Islamicate lands, the perception that loban embodies the power of the saint or God mirrors the Hindu concept of Prasad that is similarly viewed. Alongside, the concepts of the royal courts such as haziri and khuli haziri that are used as forms of atonement in the healing practices at Husian Tikri embed the Islamic universal with the local and lend the healing process a uniquely cosmopolitan hue.
This book is one of the few in the genre of the social history of Islamic healing that brings the universalist canonical texts of Islam, and its pan-Islamic individual, cultural and spatial referents, in close conjunction with local practice in India. Studies on Islamic healing have focused on the production and dissemination of universalist literature like the Tibb-i-Nabawi that straddles the local and the universal as embodied in prophetic wisdom. However, these works remain prescriptive in nature, inaccessible to ordinary people and confined to the domain of elite practitioners. In contrast, the study of Husain Tikri brings the Islamic concepts of healing in close contact with local cultural signification via the experiences of ordinary pilgrims and their perception of the site’s therapeutic prowess. As a historian with an interest in the long history of healing sites, I feel that this wonderful ethnography of the site can be hugely enriched with a little more historicisation. What is the settlement history of its location? Did the area have a history of earlier contact with the Shia intellectual world in the Middle East? Why were the tombs of only the martyrs of Karbala chosen for replicas? Was it only a question of Shia population or an earlier more diversified contact with the Shia courts and society? Why did the site come up in the late nineteenth century? Did that moment in India’s colonial past shape the way the site developed? What changes can be seen at the site when the princely states were being eroded through the long twentieth century? What was the response of the Bhopal princely family with their very Wahabi orientation towards the site? Did they ever visit it? The latter question merits attention in a study that brings court culture and rituals central to the networks that string shrines together as healing sites. However, these questions do not take away the fresh insights, delightful anecdotes and narratives that make the reader experience Husain Tikri as a pilgrim even when sitting in far away New Delhi!