scene in a local ta‘zi̅yeh production. When he was in the second grade, he finally refused to play the role of the bride. He recounts the following: “What triggered the refusal I no longer exactly remember, but I remember bursting into angry tears at either being pinched, winked at, or obscenely teased as if I were a real girl.”62 He goes on to say that “Such teasing and humor had a regular place: the man who played Zeinab (sister of Husain, who led the women and children after the massacre …) always had a big mustache, and when someone would make a rude comment to him, he would show his mustache from under his chador. Typically, he had an obscene tongue as well, and would respond to propositioning with such retorts as, ‘Yes, I’ll sleep with you; bring your mother too.’”63 Abedi remarks that there was even “ribald mockery” of the ta‘zi̅yeh itself: “Shemr and Zeinab would replay their repartee from the passion play in obscene variations, e.g., Shemr: … If you are Zeinab, then what’s that penis? Zeinab: … God knows it is an extra piece of meat.”64 He finally notes that weeping was not always real but was sometimes pretend, but it nevertheless brought merit. Such reversals of the somber mood associated with the sacred month must also be accounted for in any discussion of Muharram rituals.65
Lastly, let me simply point out the testimony of Iranian friends who have mentioned to me repeatedly that as young men and women they always looked forward excitedly to the advent of Muharram. They fondly remember it as a time of festivity, food, family reunions, and occasions for social intercourse. One male friend of mine, who had been a teenager in prerevolution Iran, said many of the young men wanted to join dastehs not necessarily out of compassion for Husayn but because they wanted to attract the admiring gazes of young women and prospective marriage partners. Moreover, referring to the flagellation processions in Nabatiyya, located in southern Lebanon, Richard Norton and Ali Safa add that after the processions were over, “young men casually walked the street showing off their blood-spattered clothes as testimony to their fidelity to Shiism. Teenage girls enjoyed themselves, sometimes ogling their male contemporaries, sometimes giggling.”66 The flagellation therefore provided an opportunity for playful competition through a macho display of bloodletting. Muharram, in other words, offers the possibility of merging the sacred and the profane; it is profane social activity within a sacred frame of temporal reference.
The profane dimension is certainly found among the South Asian Shi‘ah as well, and even more so among their Sunni brethren. In his brilliantly conceived 1966 Hindi novel titled Ādhā Gā̃v (Half a Village), which unfolds in ten chapters corresponding to the days leading up to ‘āshūrā’, Rahi Masoom Reza paints a picture of Muharram in a rural area of northern India as a time of excitement and celebration. For Reza, an avowed Marxist and secular Shi‘ah, Muharram is filled with competition and sporting fun between neighborhoods. Concerning competitive breast-beating, for example, he recalls how “this matam used to be so powerful that the round and lotus-shaped candleshades and the crystal pieces of the chandeliers would tremble to its beat. And the silver-thread flowers embroidered on the hangings upon the platform where the taziahs stood would melt into teardrops.”67 In his world the rituals are accompanied by swordplay as well as competitive attempts to faint during mourning assemblies to receive special attention and achieve elevated social status. Reza’s muḥarram is an occasion for loud and colorful processions that attract merchants and vendors who set up stalls along the procession routes, giving the whole atmosphere a carnival-like feel.
The merger of the sacred and the secular, the happy and the sad, is a contested issue to which I should like to return in the following chapters. As we will see, the issue of praying or playing is a recurrent one. Although I do not want to ignore the pious and somber dimensions of Muharram, I also do not want to privilege them. My reason for doing so should become apparent as we proceed. I speculated earlier that as we move farther from the Shi‘i core, the Muharram observances become increasingly localized, drawing on the indigenous customs and traditions of each geographic location where they take root to create something new. At the same time, I want to argue that the tradition remains to a large extent faithful to the underlying paradigmatic nature of the Shi‘i master narrative.
In this chapter, we have seen that the material and visual dimensions of the public rituals combine with their verbal and dramatic dimensions to create a distinct ritualistic complex. Taken together, these multi-sensory events—stationary and processional, private and public, sacred and secular—comprise the observances for Husayn in Iran, telling a story that is relived each year by the faithful. Step by tedious step, the final ten days of Husayn’s life are incorporated into each person’s being through acts of bodily neglect and emotive upheaval. As a performance configuration, these events annually recreate a mood that keeps the historical master narrative of Husayn’s passion alive in the hearts and minds of those who believe in the martyr’s redemptive powers. So powerful is this narrative that it diffused along with the spread of Shi‘i Islam to the Indian subcontinent, a topic to which I will turn in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
The Passage of Rites to South Asia
Mir Athar Husain Zaidi … spent the whole year eating opium and preparing for Moharram. He had spent his whole life preparing for Moharram. The truth is that in those days the whole year was spent waiting for Moharram and the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husain.… Moharram was nothing less than a spiritual celebration.
—Rahi Masoom Reza, The Feuding Families of Village Gangauli
Muḥarram in Comparative Perspective
Although muḥarram is observed throughout India and other countries of the subcontinent with the great anticipation pointed out by Reza above, the manner in which the observance is performed differs from place to place. The ritual performances take on the vernacular character of the regional environment within which they are practiced by building on the concerns of local interest groups. This is the result of a number of factors. Many centuries of Hindu/Muslim interaction has led to various degrees of cultural borrowing, resulting in great regional variation. The ethnographic data suggest that some of the major reasons are Hindu/Muslim ratios, urban versus rural practices, and Sunni/Shi‘i population distribution. Any of the above, or combinations of them, are major factors in the formation of variation in Muslim ritual practice on the popular level. A thorough comparative study of this phenomenon has yet to be undertaken in South Asia. Indeed, A. R. Saiyid suggests that it is a somewhat neglected field in Indological studies.1
An exhaustive survey of the sort Saiyid envisions is not attempted here, because the secondary data available to me and my own observations can hardly do justice to the complexity of the rituals as practiced throughout the entire subcontinent. Rather, the second section of this chapter is based on a survey of the existing sources and my own occasional participation in muḥarram observances in northern India, with some parenthetical information provided from the south of India. I focus on the north because this is the area from which the largest number of Indians were uprooted and coerced to go to the Caribbean as indentured laborers from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The north Indian material is further supplemented by relevant literature about the event in other parts of South Asia in an attempt to offer a mosaic overview of the phenomenon that is the heart of this book. But my main aim in this chapter is to bring to light certain aspects of muḥarram that figure prominently—or, conversely, do not appear at all—in Trinidad, the geographic and ethnographic focus of the remaining chapters of this study.
I realize that the congeries of beliefs and practices that I present does not represent any specific tradition, thus making it difficult to study. But if we accept Jim Masselos’s proposition that rituals during the month of Muharram must be viewed in the plural, then presenting a composite can help us to flesh out some salient aspects of the phenomenon for comparative purposes. As he states, “Moharram is ambiguous, ambiguous in situation, in interpretation and practice. In its ambiguity lay its strength, popularity and its
