(Graduate Student Session)
My dissertation explores a widely popular yet overlooked transgressive subaltern tradition in contemporary Pakistan known as Faqiri. Faqiri emerges at the interstices of Sufi, Bhakti, and Yogic lifeworlds through the aporetic figure of the faqir. It absorbs that which is uneschewably contradictory to dominant religious and knowledge frameworks such as conservative piety or bourgeois rational knowledge. Malangs and faqirs fulfill the highest ideal of this tradition, rejecting hegemonic social norms, including the reproduction of wealth and family at the call of the divine or a saint, and performing an embodied critique of society’s hypocritical attachment to worldly wealth and performative piety by transgressing religious law and gender norms. What unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state and the ruling class’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism”.
My dissertation explores a widely popular yet overlooked transgressive subaltern tradition in contemporary Pakistan known as Faqiri. Faqiri emerges at the interstices of Sufi, Bhakti, and Yogic lifeworlds through the aporetic figure of the faqir. It absorbs that which is uneschewably contradictory to dominant religious and knowledge frameworks such as conservative piety or bourgeois rational knowledge. Malangs and faqirs fulfill the highest ideal of this tradition, rejecting hegemonic social norms, including the reproduction of wealth and family at the call of the divine or a saint, and performing an embodied critique of society’s hypocritical attachment to worldly wealth and performative piety by transgressing religious law and gender norms. What unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state and the ruling class’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism”.