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ABSTRACTS
SESSION
VI: NEGOTIATING RELIGION THROUGH PUBLIC
DISPLAY AND SPECTACLE
“Islamizing”
South Asia: Dargah Culture, Ritual Creativity and Bodily Practice
Susan Schomburg, Bates College
 This paper focuses on the nature and roles of
bodily practice in the devotional culture of Muslim saints’ shrines
(dargahs) in Tamil Nadu.
Various bodily practices, from gestures of
obeisance and veneration to ritual possession and procession, to
fire-walking, and fasting, characterize devotional practice at
Muslim saints’ shrines, complementing and intertwining with more
discursive and symbolic traditions and practices. This paper
describes a variety of bodily practices in specific ritual contexts,
including festival events at major shrine sites in Tiruchchirapalli,
Madurai and Pottalpudur. It argues that the coded, yet relatively
permissive and creative ritual culture of the dargahs -- a
ritual culture enabled by key cultural agents, including shrine
administrators -- has played an important role in historical
processes of conversion to Islam in Tamil Nadu. The dargah culture
supports both continuity with, and strategic refashioning of,
non-Islamic traditions, including non-Islamic bodily practices,
within the orbits of the shrines. With strategic symbolic,
discursive, and ritual (including bodily) practice “shifts”
orchestrated, supported, and/or tolerated by the administrators, the
dargahs thus serve as cultural “switching” sites, enabling (but not
mandating) eventual conversion to Islam among non-Muslim devotees of
the saints. Attention to bodily practice thus contributes to an
understanding of how ritual practice has functioned in historical
processes of “Islamization”/conversion to Islam in South Asia, an
analysis which complements extant scholarship which tends to focus
on political, sociological, economic and literary factors.
Bodies of Sufi Saints as Texts Beyond
Religion: Hindu and Muslim Readings of Islamic Healing Rituals in
Hyderabadi Dargah-s
Eric Rothgery, Eckerd College
 In a setting where
power is defined far less by normative religious identification and
far more by proximity to the body of the saint, his or her body
becomes the holy text embodied, locally and available for
anyone, everyone, to “read.” If God is love, the saint is embodied
love. The saint is revelatory word put into enfleshed action.
Pnina Werbner has written that the Sufi saint is, “The conduit of
divine giving, blessing the world, with the powerful capacity to
change and order both nature and human society; to overcome evil
spirits and demonic possession; to heal and pacify” (1998: 6). The
saint’s body holds tremendous power—not just baraka
(spiritual blessings), but the power of love itself (‘ishq,
muhabbat) that can transcend or militate against structural
orthodoxies. Following Foucault and Derrida, the body is more than
mere physiology, but becomes the very hermeneutical ground, the site
of complex power negotiations, that militates against neat
religious, political and social distinctions between that which is
“Hindu” and “Muslim.” I will examine healing rituals shared by
Hindus and Muslims in saint’s tombs (dargah-s) of Hyderabad,
A.P. and will argue that their bodies function as texts that propel
practitioners beyond traditional normative religious categories.
The Kumpitusevai Tradition: A Ritual
Leveling of Differences?
Selva J. Raj, Albion College
 Scholars of Indian religions have rightly drawn
our attention to the structural and performative parallels and
similarities between Hindu and Catholic festival traditions in south
India. Recent scholarship attributes this phenomenon to the Catholic
laity’s creative incorporation of familiar Hindu devotional genre
and patterns into Catholic festival tradition. Among the wide array
of rituals that encompass the hybrid Catholic festival tradition in
south India, my particular interest is in a specific bodily
devotional performance locally known as kumpitusevai.
Literally, “worship service,” kumpitusevai is especially
popular at shrines patronized by Nadar (a low-ranking merchant caste
group) Catholics. Observed on the final day of the festival, it is a
spectacular public display of intense devotion and extreme
asceticism in which devotees repeatedly perform numerous bodily
prostrations on dirt and gravel streets—unmindful of and indifferent
to the filth and squalor on the ground—for the entire duration of
the procession that can be anywhere from three to four hours. While,
in theory, anyone can participate in this ritual, the vast majority
of participants are poor peasants and possessed women who otherwise
have a marginal social and religious status. Much anticipated and
acclaimed by local residents and visiting pilgrims, this moving
physical demonstration of piety is regarded by many as the
centerpiece of the annual chariot procession at rural Catholic
shrines and pilgrimage sites in southeast Tamil Nadu.
Taking the kumpitusevai tradition at the
shrine of St. Anthony at Puliampatti as an illustrative case-study,
my paper will explore the structure, logic, and grammar of this
tradition and delineate the social and religious themes embedded in
this public, physical demonstration/display of religious devotion. I
argue that one of the functions served by this rite is its ability
to provide a religious context and ritual platform for religiously
and socially marginalized groups to temporarily transcend the neatly
defined social, economic, caste, and religious identities and
strictures that normally define human relationships in south India
and to experiment with other redemptive possibilities and
reciprocities—unavailable within institutional religion—in an
attempt to level, however temporarily, social and religious
differences as well as to gain some measure of social prestige,
ritual honor, and spiritual benefits.
Religious
Bodies on Display: Religious Processions in the South Asian
Diasporas
Knut A. Jacobsen, University of Bergen, Norway
 Processions are one of the main occasions for large groups to gather
on public streets for a religious purpose. Religious processions are
planned and staged events with clearly defined roles performed in
the streets for an audience. The religious procession is a type of
‘planned public display event.’ A procession is a group of bodies
moving together most often on public streets. Religious processions
are made up of many elements such as music and display objects, but
most significantly it is made up of human bodies and it is partly
the number of people participating that determines the success of a
procession. This paper discusses the display of religious bodies in
processions in the South Asian Diasporas. In the multicultural
context and in the minority situation of the diaspora the display
function of processions is strengthened. In the diaspora the
religious processions become public displays of the religious
identity, a way to celebrate the group’s religion and identity in
front of an audience. The processions are performed also for the
unity of the group and they bring people together from a large area.
The processions functions to display the religious group as a
collective body and as such they strengthens religious boundaries.
Many types of religious bodies are displayed in the processions such
as bodies pierced by arrows and hooks, martial arts performers,
persons dressed up as mythical beings, bodies with turbans and uncut
hair, banners explaining the body, bodies in traditional clothes,
and so on. Return to full conference schedule |
