The panel invites a discussion on the material, liturgical, and lyrical ways in which Muslim minorities apprehend their predicament through theologies of Islam. Anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and literary scholars come together to reflect upon the intersecting junctures of political and personal to explore the making, unmaking and re-making of Muslim pasts to speak to the crisis unfolding in Muslim presents, provoking us to ask: amidst rubble and ruin how does one imagine a Muslim future? For the ones mired in loss, martyrdom, destruction, and partition For the ones who are people of God. In focusing on the theological practices, traditions, poetry, commentaries and ethical readings, the panel shares a fragment of how Muslims draw upon, create, and participate to articulate their historical condition, its mythical rendering, its compromises and possibilities.
This paper examines how a form of political theology emerges in the interplay between Urdu poetry and its critical traditions. Focusing on a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem by Mirza Asad Allāh Khān Ghalib, composed shortly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the study explores the poem’s image of Judgement Day as a mahshar-e khayāl, or “a resurrection ground of thought.” The poem moves between solitude and collective assembly to advance two theological insights: that the individual contains internal multitudes of thought (even if inaccessible), and that resurrection transforms forgetfulness into awareness. Reading the poem alongside later commentary, the paper argues that the nineteenth-century Urdu literary culture articulates political theology beyond reformist prose, complicating assumptions about the secular character of Urdu literary criticism.
This paper draws on my doctoral research on Indo-Islamic music in South Asia to discuss how the hyperlocal travelling cultures of Indo-Islamic music becomes a tool to map the rhizomatic networks of inter-city migration of North Indian Muslims to Bengal in the mid 19th century. The varied consequences of the movement and displacement of Bihari Muslims and its associated socio-political vulnerabilities forms the core of this chapter. Deriving from ethnography conducted in Little Awadh in Calcutta I argue how the Shia liturgies of Hussaini poet Saleha Begum Maqhfi encode the “hijrat” or migration of Bihari Muslim families to Calcutta. Based on literary and textual analysis of exemplary marsiya and nauha composed by Maqhfi, I wish to argue how her Indo-Islamic liturgies honouring Imam Hussain’s valour and benefaction may also add to our understating of the many socio-political and emotional anxieties faced by Bihari “mutwassit” (middle class) Muslims of Little Awadh in Calcutta.
This paper examines the making and circulation of tāʿziyas in the small towns of Masauli, Biswan, and Mahmudabad in North India to explore how mourning for Imam Husayn becomes embedded in practices of craft, labor, and devotion. While scholarship on Muharram has largely focused on major urban centers such as Lucknow or Hyderabad, this study shifts attention to qasbati contexts where tāʿziyadari is sustained through localized networks of artisans, patrons, and devotees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation during Muharram processions, the paper argues that the tāʿziya functions not merely as a symbolic representation of Husayn’s shrine in Karbala but as an intercessory object through which devotees seek closeness to God (Allah).
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