New Directions in South Asian Religions

This paper follows the figure of Prāṇnāth (c. 1618-1694), the preeminent religious preacher of the Praṇāmī order (sampradāya). Straddling Kṛṣṇa-centered Vaiṣṇavism and Nizārī Ismā‘īlism—as well as a range of courtly spaces from Shahjahanabad/Delhi to Panna (Bundelkhand)—Prāṇnāth fashioned himself into a Mahdī, or messiah, in the line of Kṛṣṇa, Muḥammad, and Christ. In my paper, I closely examine a Hindavī text from the Praṇāmī scriptural corpus expressly addressed to the Muslims of Hindustān. I study the text’s (and more generally, Prāṇnāth’s) incorporation of Qurʾānic eschatology into Vaiṣṇava cosmology, as well as its social purport of transcending orthodoxies and immiscible sectarian differences. Indic sampradāyas, this paper aims to argue, often encountered Islam in ways that were neither fleeting nor so exogenous as to be incapable of transforming those very traditions. In the main, I hope to revisit prevailing heuristic habits of treating the ‘Indic’ and the ‘Islamic’ as separable civilizational matrices intersecting only under asymmetrical conditions.

It is a common view among scholars of South Asian Islam that Muslims in colonial India internalized Victorian sexual norms and distanced themselves from classical Persian texts due, in large part, to their erotic and homoerotic content. This paper challenges this ‘derivative discourse’ of social and religious change by exploring a parallel tradition of engagement with Persian literature. While some “modernist” Muslim intellectuals, mostly those with close ties to the colonial state, sought to discredit the sexual norms of classical Persian and Urdu literature, commercial publishing houses continued to circulate these texts widely, often with interpretive frames that signaled their enduring relevance to a broad readership. An early modern tradition of engaging Persian literature not only survived but reached new audiences through the medium of print. I demonstrate the point by drawing on the Indian reception of a thirteenth-century Persian text that became one of the most printed books in nineteenth-century India: the Gulistan (Rose-Garden) of Saʿdi.

Mughal Princess Jahanara (d.1681) had a curious experience of Islam. Mughal political zeitgeist forbade princesses, her generation onwards, from fulfilling the religious duty of heterosexual marriage. And Sufism, whose practitioners have often flouted the marriage injunction, allowed her to go only so far; she was not granted spiritual succession to Maulana Shah for being a woman. However, Jahanara’s privilege as the princess of the contemporary world’s wealthiest empire helped her deal with this situation creatively: She constructed Agra’s central mosque and a porch at Moinuddin Chishti’s dargah, both of which reserved, and have continued to reserve, spaces for women worshipers. What also continues at the mosque till date is the use of henna, a material with strong connotations of marriage and fecundity in Persianate cultures. In her writings, Jahanara astutely undoes Persian’s gender-neutrality, to assert an emphatic female voice. These, she did by neither transgressing rebelliously nor risking politico-religious perpetration. 

In the southern Indian state of Kerala, velichappatus (ritual possession specialists) have been attempting to redefine their ritual activities as work to secure fair compensation from the State-administered temple governing boards. In 2008, velichappatus from across the state formed a trade union-like collective I will refer to as the Bhagavathy Komaram Sangham (BKS) to demand healthcare benefits and pensions from the state government.  In the last few years, the mandate of this collective has expanded to include socio-cultural and legal activities undertaken to uphold the Goddess’s sovereignty and authority. In this paper, I trace the story of Kamala, a founding member of the BKS and examines what serving the Goddess means to ritual actors like the velichappatu. In attempting to translate worship as a form of work, what ethical aspirations are velichappatus trying to articulate, and what kinds of ethical communities are they creating?