Knots in the Weave: Female Friendship, Ritual Tension, and the Religious Other

In 2017, I enrolled as a student in a sewing class on the premises of a temple compound dedicated to the Sindhi Hindu deity Jhoolelal, in a municipality that I refer to as Larr Town, in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Larr Town for 14 months between 2016-2018. The sewing class was organized by Larr Town’s Hindu panchayat (council) as a charitable initiative to teach women an income-generating skill. My sewing classmates were 30 girls between the ages of 15 and 20 who came from both Hindu and Muslim households in the neighborhoods surrounding the temple.

Larr Town has a significantly larger proportion of Hindu residents than most of Pakistan. While the 2017 census shows Pakistan to be 96 percent Muslim and 2.14 percent Hindu, the municipality of Larr Town is 10 percent Hindu and the three surrounding rural districts are 34, 39, and 52 percent Hindu respectively (Bureau of Statistics 2017).

Specific arrangements of memory, neighborly social relations, and wider-scale politics formed the textured surface over which social relationships within the sewing class were formed. The sewing class members worked to create commensality amidst a strong undercurrent of inter-religious antagonism, Hindus’ pervasive sense of insecurity amidst their neighbors, and vulnerability to violence even through misplaced words or actions. Being caught in the wrong words can lead to a violent outcome in Pakistan. My Hindu interlocutors across various field sites, in Larr Town and beyond, would frequently express the need to be very careful with words lest they get caught in a terrible maelstrom.

As I spent time in the sewing class, I began paying attention to how it was tenuously held together as a space outside the home for girls and women to gather and learn together, despite the constant possibility of violence and social breakdown due to the class’ location, patronage, and membership. The circulation of these affects amidst the proximity of neighbors not only poisoned ordinary interactions and everyday life but also enabled other possibilities of encroachment and intimacy (N. Khan 2010).

In this paper, I trace how women’s commitment to meet outside the home every day to sew, within a Hindu religious space whose patrons sought to entrench themselves among neighbours, shapes inter-religious relations in Larr Town. My concern is not with the production of civic-minded tolerance or gendered pluralism. My interlocutors were committed to maintaining and repairing relations with one another, even while aware that the terrain was laden with pitfalls and could shift below their feet very quickly.

I consider how inter-religious and ritual tensions arose in such a textured space, and how sewing class members worked to weave them back into the fabric of everyday life. In the sewing class, this was interwoven with overtures of friendship, domestic intimacy, and social memories of past neighborly violence. The emergence of mutual antagonisms and disagreements within this weave revealed both the fragility of the sewing class as a viable, inter-religious social space and the work it took to maintain it.

Members of the sewing class frequently crossed lines of civility and maintained a skeptical stance toward one another. The space they shared was not a common one but an emphatically Hindu, sacred one within a majoritarian Muslim milieu. In the class, girls displayed unreciprocated curiosity, made crude jokes, prodded to the point of discomfort, and constantly kept an eye out for certain forms of ritual transgression. Yet their collective labor of sharing life (con vivere) foregrounded a commitment to share certain experiences, thereby generating new challenges by opening them up to hostility alongside unexpected intimacies.

Inter-religious milieus are replete with ritual tensions, whether in moments of encounter or more abstract concerns about the unbidden seepage of ideas (Moyaert 2017; Telle 2016). Ritual rivalries, in which the very meaning of liturgical practices is up for debate, are one way in which theological discourses within inter-religious milieus engage with one another, engendering new relationships (Mahadev 2016; Henn 2008).

Drawing on new scholarship on the promise and peril of Hindu-Muslim friendship (Tareen 2023), in this paper I explore the careful management of ritual tensions and elaborate forms of aversion and avoidance in an unambiguously Hindu sacred space by young women grasping for language to encounter and parry what they understood as religious difference, as well as to find some ritual common ground with one another. However, these were not civil or tolerant relations in the liberal sense whereby commonality is grounded in forms of shared citizenship. Convivial social relations could come undone at any moment through misplaced words or actions, in an atmosphere laden with the possibility of majoritarian violence.

 I show how these relied upon certain shared norms, expectations, and attitudes that were capacious enough to bear some transgressions and failures but were not free from the seepage of the past. Rather than smoothening over old wounds, they could insinuate fault lines into the present.