Book review: Yogesh Snehi. 2019. Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams,Memories,Territoriality

At a formal level, contemporary Indian society seems more divided, demarcated and communalised than ever. Legislation, court rulings, as well as public campaigns and rituals led by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party stress India’s exclusively Hinduised dominance/superiority while challenging its vast heritage of socio-religious and cultural multiplicity, fluidity and ambiguity.

Yogesh Snehi’s book is part of a scholarly endeavour to address this polarised society through critical analysis. The current communal hostilities have impacted a retrospective reading of inter-religious relations in India and still affects current research. Nevertheless, prominent studies have provided in-depth readings of shared, syncretistic spaces in the pre-modern era, whereas others have problematised the somewhat naive tendency to see syncretistic spaces as devoid of hierarchy and violence (Mayaram 2012), and still others have put forward nuanced interpretations of contemporary shared, blurred or ambiguous cultures, multiple belonging and cosmopolitanism (Frøystad 2006).

This book tackles these issues by addressing one of the most loaded spaces of modern India: Punjab, a bisected space that still bears the wounds of the founding trauma of the 1947 Partition, a historical event that underpins the ‘pathological politics’ (Ahmed 2002) that plagues India at large. Although this ‘pathological’ dimension refers mainly to the state apparatus and to ‘grand narratives’ centralised around firm religious identities, local dimensions can raise serious doubts as to the comprehensive validity of ‘grand narratives’ and whether a division into ‘grand’ versus ‘small’ is feasible. Overall, it is arguable whether this issue is an ontological one—what exists in the social space and defines it—or epistemological, addressing the blind spots created by hyper-nationalist knowledge mechanisms. The intellectual effort evident in Snehi’s work reshuffles the cards in the contemporary communalist era while simultaneously offering a historical, epistemological and ontological critique that calls for a reformulation of social cognisance. This reshaping is enabled through the local and everyday, while the local and mundane transcend time, and spread far beyond the locality.

The Partition, which brutally bisected Punjab and its sacred landscapes, is the vantage point for Snehi’s work (Boivin 2019 addresses similar issues in Sindh) and articulates a comprehensive critique, refuting pre- and post-Partition Punjabi socio-religious fabric as consisting of solid religious communities of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. Rather, each of them, as analysed in the first chapter, is endowed with fluid boundaries shaped by historical dynamism and converging socio-religious circles. Specifically, Snehi examines the dynamic arena of post-Partition shrines, not necessarily the major and institutionalised ones, but the smaller and marginal ones—dargahs, pirkhanas, mazars—that often serve as an arena of consolation and healing for disempowered populations. Some of these sites are devoted to saints who have no documented hagiographies or historiographies, a fact that contributes to their structured fluidity, which the author explores through a variety of sources: colonial documents, gazetteers, ethnographic works, and visual culture.

By contrast to the emphasis on ritual practices discussed in previous studies, Snehi seeks to explore the shrines as social realities and discursive fields set against economic and historic contexts such as trade routes and demographic migrations (pp. 94–95) which turned them into meeting points for social and cultural exchange and conflicts (p. 97) that are not necessarily religious. Schematically speaking, saints who hailed from Central Asia underwent processes of localisation, textualisation and ritualisation (p. 99), that unravelled with the rupture of the socio-cultural fabric in 1947. Some of the shrines were abandoned, but others were revived under new patronage, continued to form pilgrimage destinations and regained popularity within a reconfigured space. This process required adaptation that veered towards bureaucratisation and systematisation under new, differing circumstances.

The case of Abohar, analysed in various parts of this book, is an encapsulated example of this move. It is located on the ancient trade route that connects Uch and Multan via Pakpattan to Delhi; since economic paths merge with cultural ones, this site exemplifies the tradition of the Panj Pirs, with its multiplicity of potential resonances including the five Pandavas, the Panjtan Pak in Islam, and the five sacred personages in Shaivism (p. 105). With the rapid rise in the volume of trade and military activity during the Sultanate era, it gained further strength through the notion of wilayat (the spiritual and political territory attributed to Sufi shaikhs). Although this term denotes the tense interdependence between political and spiritual authorities, Snehi extends it to the network of spatial, symbolic and concrete ties interwoven around the shrines, and to the production of narratives detached from modern historiography and demarcations. These enable a multiplicity of affiliations and re-signifying of spaces and ritual cultures along narrative and experiential lines.

These narratives also pave the way for the formation of visual and cognitive ties between disconnected spaces (physically, temporally, politically), and to interpretational acts in which saints and spaces are imagined, remembered, dreamt and manifested in the consciousness of broad audiences, while transcending temporal limits and the physical boundaries of the nation-state. Whereas formal boundaries certainly crashed the social milieu, they failed to reside in contemporary Punjabi consciousness. At this juncture the epistemological question merges with the ontological, endowing consciousness or imagination with a significant political power. From a marginal standpoint, Snehi argues, a significant process of historical formation has been produced, forming a serious alternative approach countering vast demarcating ‘grand’ schemes (p. 136). In this sense this work forms part of a consistent effort to challenge the dominant epistemology on socio-religious structures and calls for an expansion of the ontology of space.