rewarded with a blissful eternity in paradise. Those who did not observe in this manner would join Yazid in the “deepest pit of fire.”12
Be that as it may, the idea of mourning as a measure of identification and devotion is not a major concept in the religious and philosophical speculations of the classical Hindu tradition. Nevertheless, on the level of devotional practice, female Hindu mourning groups are popularly found in south India, and cults of deified heroes and heroines are quite common on the folk level.13 Public pūjās (ritual worship) are, however, characteristically engulfed by melās (fairs) that allow for the merger of sacred and profane activities.14 It is indeed difficult to find any public religious service in South Asia being performed without the requisite merchants, vendors, acrobats, dancers, and performers. In this sense, the sacred and the profane are closely associated, if not inextricably enmeshed. It may not seem odd, therefore, to find elements of buffoonery, clowning, dancing, and sexual license associated with muḥarram observances in India. The clowning dimension is particularly true in the south, where the Muslim population is very much a minority even in so-called Muslim centers, which makes it difficult for it to exert control over external accretions to the rite. We must remember also that the Shi‘ah remain a minority within a minority. One observer has noted, for example, that muḥarram, as performed in the Deccan, “is the biggest carnival of the year; observed more by Sunnis than Shi‘as.”15 What this signifies is a gradual co-optation of the rite from the Shi‘ah, which is the unavoidable consequence of coexisting in a religiously plural country.
By and large, the comic portions of the event are limited primarily to the Sunni sector of the Muslim community. This is probably the case because most of the Sunnis in India do not mourn the death of Husayn. T. Vedantam explains it as follows: “According to many Sunnis the festival signifies the triumph of virtue and truth over evil and that there is no place for mourning.”16 Learned Indo-Shi‘i Muslims see comic behavior during Muharram as mockery, however, and such performances often lead to theological debates and physical clashes between Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims.17 But Sunnis make countercharges against the Shi‘ah. Consider the following personal memoir by the well-known Indian Sunni scholar Khuda Bukhsh Khan (1842–1908 C.E.), whose father would never allow his children to view the Muharram processions because he regarded them as a “mockery” and a “travesty.” Khan recalls how his father “thought it wicked to a degree to convert the anniversary of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Islam into a day of carnival and festivity, instead of observing it scrupulously as one of veritable mourning.”18 Obviously, the learned ustād’s father was not aware of the private forms of worship held in the majlis.
For the Indian Shi‘ah, however, muḥarram is still a predominantly sober event conforming to the Persian theological paradigm of identification with the supreme martyr through subjective apprehension. The manifest differences between Iranian and Indian Shi‘i modes of observance are numerous nonetheless. First of all, in India there is very little staged reenactment of the historical events at Karbala, either privately or publicly.19 Reenactments are limited mostly to martial displays with swords and sticks. Rather, the reenactment occurs as a gradual process unfolding over a ten-day period within a larger symbolic space. The arena of performance, be it the house, the neighborhood, the village, or the city, becomes a microcosm of Karbala. This is most vivid on the tenth of Muharram when the Indian Shi‘ah symbolically “make a pilgrimage” (zi̅yārat karnā) to Karbala by visiting graveyards where the ta‘zi̅yahs are buried.20
Instead of the ritual dramas, we find a greater emphasis on narrating the tragedy through the recitation of mars̲i̅yah (elegy), the singing of nauḥah (dirge), and other forms of chanted laments at numerous majalis. The majālis may be private or public gatherings for ritual mourning that are held both in homes and at specially constructed sites.21 The development of mars̲i̅yah composition and recitation in India is obviously an innovative continuation of the rauz̤eh khvāni̅ tradition of Iran. Even though Kashifi’s Persian classic was translated into South Asian languages, a separate and distinct poetic tradition emerged in the subcontinent. Based on their Perso-Arabic predecessors, new styles of elegy became prevalent in a number of Indian vernacular languages, and their recitation to induce weeping during mourning assemblies continued to preserve the memory of Husayn’s passion.22 The Indic tradition of mars̲i̅yah writing and recitation in Urdu goes back to sixteenth-century Golconda and Bijapur in the Deccan, and the tradition flourished in nineteenth-century Lucknow.23
The majlis is the central focus of muḥarram observance in India, according to elite spokesmen of the Shi‘ah. Keith Hjortshoj, working in Lucknow, has noted that the public processional rituals, fire walking, and states of possession that I survey below are virtually meaningless without the majālis. This may well be the case, but we cannot disregard ostentatious public events completely, for we have already seen that the private and public have been closely interrelated in Iran. Clearly, learned exegesis serves as a guide for the normative behavior during the sacred month that is supposed to induce subjective apprehension of Imam Husayn’s suffering, but the variety of activities found on the streets during the processions cannot be ignored either. It is precisely in these public arenas that the non-Shi‘i sector of society participates most visibly and exuberantly, leading to cultural encounter and gradual transformation of the observance through an ongoing process of cultural creolization. It is also in this public sphere that muḥarram becomes a contested phenomenon that needs to be negotiated between the numerous parties involved: Shi‘ah, Sunni, and Hindu. But it is a sad truth that when the negotiating of ritual authority and practice fails on the peaceful level through what I call decreolization, violence ensues. Accounts from the colonial and modern period amply demonstrate this fact. Communal violence between the Sunni and the Shi‘ah or between Muslim and Hindu is often the case during Muharram. Some examples of this will be provided below, but to conclude this general discussion, let me return to the issue of the interaction between public and private as the central ingredient of the observances in India.
There is certainly a dialectical relationship between the private majlis and the public julūs that is not necessarily condoned by orthodoxy but is pragmatically maintained by the masses in popular practice. For example, during the ten days a participant may attend a number of majālis. While at a majlis, one may listen to the recitation of mars̲i̅yah corresponding to the historic events commemorated on that day. There will be intense ritualized weeping and mātam (breast-beating), followed by a period of silence. After the majlis disperses, the individual may participate in one of numerous public processions for a while and then attend yet other majālis. This pattern continues for the duration of the observance. There is no incongruity here. The individual can still experience the suffering of the martyr through participation in both types of events. The drama, in other words, is not acted out on a stage in India but is nevertheless reenacted and experienced through the varied actions of the community of believers, even if other public activities surrounding the event verge on the carnivalesque. The mars̲i̅yah recitations during the majālis and the communal processions that occur in varying degrees of intensity throughout the first ten days of Muharram are two central aspects of such performative action, and there is an oscillating tension between them.
Let us now move on to a brief survey of various muḥarram activities. By using specific ethnographic examples and travelers’ accounts, I wish to underscore the interaction of public and private domains of observance as well as the multisectarian nature of the phenomenon in India. The literature upon which I draw is both historical and modern, but I focus on accounts from the mid-nineteenth century to the third decade of the twentieth century because this is the period when Indian indentured laborers were uprooted to various islands under British control.
A South Asian Muḥarram Montage
Throughout most of the Indian subcontinent, the observances begin with the sighting of the new moon on the evening
