Person in Place: Possession and Power at an Indian Islamic Saint Shrine
- Person in Place: Possession and Power at an Indian Islamic Saint Shrine
Since the popularization of Michel Foucault in the Western academy and, for those who study so-called non-Western cultures, the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, scholars have become increasingly aware of the culturally and historically particular nature of their categories and the inherently political nature of knowledge production.1 While early feminist scholarship was also instrumental in this process, later feminist scholarship has argued that the category of gender itself is a culturally and historically specific idea that cannot be applied cross-culturally.2 For those who study religious practices in non-Western contexts, and particularly practices that are predominantly women’s, the question of whether or not gender should be a primary category of analysis is particularly salient. In this article, I will consider a common form of spirit possession known as ḥāẓirī, which is practiced predominantly by women of all religious backgrounds at the shrines of Muslim saints and martyrs. In exploring this phenomenon, I discuss what one might learn about ḥāẓirī using the lens of feminist scholarship and what feminist scholarship itself might learn from ḥāẓirī.
Ḥāẓirī, which is widely practiced throughout the Indian subcontinent, seems to be an instructive place to ground a discussion of gender, power, and agency in women’s lives. In India, spirit possession is a phenomenon associated most strongly (although not exclusively) with women. Many Indians believe that this is explained by women’s inherent predisposition to possession, which is largely predicated on the notion that menstruation and childbirth render them ritually impure and therefore vulnerable to spiritual attack. Possession by its very nature seems to raise questions about the relationship between autonomy and agency, thereby providing material for the formulation of new theories of [End Page 31] subjectivity, power, and agency (issues that have historically been the focus of feminist scholarship). However, through analysis of the language used to describe ḥāẓirī, I will show that ḥāẓirī is best understood without recourse to gender as a primary category of analysis. This is the case, I argue, because the agency (and therefore power) of those who engage in ḥāẓirī lies in time and place rather than in person or personhood. Because power and agency are not linked with individual subjectivity, gender ceases to be a useful primary category of analysis. Ultimately, I suggest that feminist scholarship itself might be usefully modified by shifting focus from theories of subjectivity toward theories of place and context.3
On the Indian subcontinent, the range of spirit possession practices is vast, and consequently defies meaningful generalization. ḥāẓirī, which literally means “presence,” is practiced by Hindus, Muslims, and Christians in non-mosque, ambiguously Islamic Indian religious spaces. These spaces can mainly be categorized as the tombs of Sufi saints, called dargāḥs, but also include Shiite imāmbāṛās (shrines built in memory of the twelve Shiite imams), as well as larger, dargāḥ-like shrines called rauzās that combine the qualities of dargāḥs and imāmbāṛās: that is, from the outside they look the same as buildings that house the tombs of Sufi saints but, like imāmbāṛās, actually house models of the tombs of the major Muslim martyrs of Karbala.4 The material presented in this article mainly derives from the ritual and everyday life of a pilgrimage center in northwestern Madhya Pradesh known as ḥusain Ṭekrī (literally, Husain Hill), which houses a collection of rauzās built in memory of the martyrs of Karbala (including Husain and Abbas) as well as several other major Islamic figures (including Ali). The site was founded in 1886 CE to mark the place in the present-day town of Jaora where villagers reported visions of a miraculous visitation of Husain and his family, and it enjoys a strong reputation in the spiritual healing circuit of northern India, attracting pilgrims of all major religious traditions from throughout the region, as well as specifically Shiite populations from major urban centers including Delhi, Hyderabad, Bombay, Bhopal, and Lucknow.
In India, ambiguously Islamic religious spaces generally enjoy a reputation as places of charismatic healing, and the type of healing they offer nearly always...
