in Iran
In Iran, staged performance grew out of processional observances that were recorded by Muslim historiographers as early as the tenth century. The reactualizations first took place at locations where large numbers of people could gather, like crossroads or public squares. Ritual battles would take place in front of an audience while tableaux of bloodied martyrs moved past the stationary audience on wheeled platforms. In the sixteenth century, a private tradition of verbal martyr narration called rauz̤eh khvāni̅ also began to flourish. These two traditions—public performance and private recitation—existed side by side but separately for nearly two hundred and fifty years. The two fused in the mid-eighteenth century to create what we know today as ta‘zi̅yeh. Ta‘zi̅yeh, like the muḥarram processions, developed historically as a communal event. The important element in the observance was participation. An audience member could not just observe passively. The viewer had to show emotion by weeping in order to experience the suffering of Husayn, and only in this way could he or she completely identify with the martyr.
In spite of the numerous historical changes that have contributed to the shaping of ta‘zi̅yeh as we know it today, the soteriological purpose has remained constant: participation in the performance helps an individual to obtain salvation through the intercession of the martyr. The vicarious suffering and death of Husayn has been an instrument of redemption for all believers, and belief has been most readily manifested by performance participation. This underlying theological goal is central to the observance worldwide, and a host of scholars have identified it as the theological core complex of the Karbala paradigm adumbrated above. I intend to elucidate the paradigm as an overall frame for discussing the dialectics of the local and the global with regard to the rite’s development in Trinidad.
Muḥarram in South Asia
Although many similarities exist between the Indic subcontinent and Iran in terms of performing muḥarram rituals, there are some great differences as well. A survey of Indian variations on the rite is the theme of Chapter 3, with special attention being paid to Banaras, where I first observed the event in the early 1980s.6 Perhaps the greatest and most significant difference in muḥarram rituals as observed in Shi‘i countries and in India lies in the use of the word ta‘zi̅yeh (Ur. ta‘zi̅yah). In Persian it is used to denote the ritual drama, or passion play, of Husayn’s death. The term has a different meaning in South Asia, however. There it is the name given to the model tombs, the focal point of the public processions that take place during the event, and it is this aspect of the observance that becomes the dominating material feature of the rite in Trinidad. It is thus to India that we must look closely to identify the most salient aspects and morphological features of the observance in Trinidad.
As in Trinidad, there is not an emphasis on staged performance during the month of Muharram in India. Rather, the reenactment of Husayn’s passion occurs as an unfolding social process 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. Although Iran provides the underlying logic and symbolism for the event in the form of the Karbala paradigm, India provides the ritualistic precedent for the observance in Trinidad. Instead of staged drama, we find a greater emphasis on conveying the tragedy through the recitation of mars̲i̅yahs (martyr poems) and the singing of nauḥahs (dirges) at majālis (sing. majlis), social gatherings for ritual mourning. The development of mars̲i̅yah composition and recitation in India is obviously an innovative continuation of the rouz̤eh khvāni̅ tradition of Iran.7 Although the private majlis is the central focus of the muḥarram observance in India, as it is elsewhere in South Asia, the public processional rituals that occur on the streets are also important on the level of popular piety. There is a distinct dialectic between these private and public spheres of action that is evident in Trinidad as well. But whereas India continues the verbal narrative tradition of Iran, Trinidad has transformed language to rhythm, replacing verbal performances with a series of drum “hands” to convey the tragic story in a nonverbal, musical fashion. I wish to suggest that these two spheres allow for the emergence of multilayered understandings of the event by different interpretive communities. To make this point, I introduce the notion of “esoteric” and “exoteric” interpretations of the rite depending largely on the interpreter’s level of participatory intimacy with the rituals performed.
Again as in Trinidad, the ambulatory public observances and stationary private ones converge on the tenth of Muharram (‘āshūrā’) in India, the culminating day when participants embark on a symbolic pilgrimage by carrying their ta‘zi̅yahs in a huge procession to graveyards representing the plains of Karbala where Husayn was murdered. The ta‘zi̅yahs are then buried ideally during the noonday hour, the legendary time of Husayn’s last breath.8 In some parts of India, the ta‘zi̅yahs are immersed in rivers, oceans, or sacred tanks of water following the Hindu custom of deity immersion (visarjan) after a religious festival. The last point above indicates another important theme of my study: cultural accommodation. I wish to argue that the necessary process of a minority religious community adopting local customs has allowed the rituals to thrive creatively in each of the environments discussed. I refer to this process as “cultural creolization,” an appropriate alternative to the outdated and problematic concept of syncretism.9 Syncretism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, suggests an “attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices.”10 With its emphasis on an “attempted union,” the dictionary definition suggests an inconsistency in doctrine and practice. More appropriately, exploring creolization and the concomitant concept of “decreolization” as an alternative to syncretism allows me to emphasize human agency, the conscious decisions made by human actors, in my analysis of a rite’s historical transformation. Such work is sorely needed in ritual studies.
In their discussion of South Pacific spirit possession, Alan Howard and Jeannette Mageo follow Nicholas Thomas to argue that “parts of cultures often become metonyms for cultural continuity,” which results in “specific segments of reconfigured historical experience” becoming tradition.11 Hosay is one such metonym, an emblem of identity that is reworked constantly in different contexts. In stating this, however, I do not want to imply naive and syncretistic adaptations, for that would deny the essential role of human agency in the reinvention of tradition. For my purposes, the concept of creolization is more suitable to get at the “highly self-conscious and reflective” dimensions of cultural borrowing and subsequent reinvention to which Howard and Mageo refer.12
Hosay in Trinidad
The Trinidadian style of commemorating Husayn’s martyrdom seems very different from the Iranian and Indian forms at first glance, and much of the scarce literature on the rite makes ample mention of its purported creole nature.13 A closer look at the complex event reveals continuities with its older counterparts, constantly reminding us of its north Indian sources of origin. Hosay, as it is expressed today, is a direct by-product of earlier muḥarram observances that were brought to Trinidad by indentured East Indians who came to work on plantations as early as May 30, 1845. However, although the Indian origins of the rite can be observed clearly in Trinidad, there is no question that the ritual performance has gone through a fairly lengthy process of indigenization. The ethnographic portion of my text draws extensively on the words and opinions of the people involved in the rite.
While Trinidadian Shi‘i Muslims ideally show emotion for Husayn through public displays of drumming to signify the incidents pertaining to Husayn’s death and through the painstaking construction of the model tombs known as tadjahs, we also find that the observance becomes marked by gaiety and celebration for the revelers who participate in the public processions as audience members. The Trinidadian form of the rite becomes “carnivalized,” to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, so that it takes on aspects of observances occurring during periods of carnival in the
