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 continuity.”2 Before proceeding with my ambiguous survey, however, some general observations are in order.
There are some great differences concerning the manner in which muḥarram is observed in predominantly Muslim countries and in India. Perhaps the greatest and most significant difference between India and Muslim nations lies in the use of the word ta‘zi̅yeh. Whereas the term is used in Persian to refer to the ritual drama, it has a different connotation in South Asia. There it is the name given to the model cenotaphs, the focal point of the public processions that take place during the event in many parts of northern India. Such differences notwithstanding, the historical consciousness instilled in believers by the Muharram narratives continued to remain an integral part of the ritual complex as developed and practiced in India. Indeed, I believe I can reasonably argue that it is the historical narrative that has kept the tradition alive and vital in many parts of the world. According to oral legend, muḥarram was known in India as early as 1398 C.E., when the conqueror from Samarqand, Timur Lenk (1336–1405 C.E.), better known as Tamerlane in English, crossed the Indus to implant Islam firmly in the subcontinent and to establish political rule.3
Vernon Schubel provides an abbreviated account of the legend:
[W]hile in Iraq Timur converted to Shi‘ism and became so deeply and emotionally attached to the area around Karbala that he would not move his troops from that spot. In order to deal with this situation, the ‘ulama of the region built a replica of the tomb which he could take with him out of the dust and clay of that place. It is reported that nightly sounds of mourning and lamentation could be heard arising from the model. It was this ta‘zi̅yah which was brought to India by Timur during his invasion.4
Given that Timur visited Karbala only after his invasion of India, the historicity of the account is questionable. Nonetheless, it is a pious narrative still in circulation today that functions as an etiological justification for the ostentatious practice of building model tombs. These artistically rendered replicas of Husayn’s actual tomb at Karbala came to be known as ta‘zi̅yahs in Urdu and other north Indian languages. In South Asia, symbolic pilgrimage thus came to replace the arduous physical pilgrimage to Karbala.
Note that in India and elsewhere on the subcontinent the object of veneration is given the same name as the staged, dramatic renderings of Husayn’s passion in Iran. This interesting terminological shift suggests something pervasive about Indian public display events—the importance of external displays and processions during communal rituals. In this sense, these rituals share much in common with Hindu religious processions. The similarity between Hindu and South Asian Muslim processional rituals has not gone unnoticed. Garcin de Tassy, for example, wrote in 1831 that “Muslim festivals, … appear to read like those of the Hindus.” To illustrate, he compares muḥarram to the Durga pūjā: “Like the Durga Puja, the ta’zia is observed for ten days. On the final day the Hindus immerse the image of the goddess in a river amidst huge crowds and great pomp, while a thousand musical instruments are played. The same thing happened with the Muslim festival. Mourning is observed for ten days and the ta’zia, a replica of the tomb of Husain, is generally immersed in a river with the same pomp.”5 Juan Cole has pointed out more recently that Hindu participation in muḥarram has been fairly widespread for centuries. He also notes that Hindus introduced certain practices to the observance that were adopted by high-caste Muslims.6 The observances during Muharram were thus transcommunal from early on in the encounter between Muslims and Hindus, allowing for public occasions during which actors could negotiate radically different cultural and sectarian worldviews. But as Saiyid rightly points out, Hindu influence alone is not enough to explain muḥarram’s development in South Asia.7 In fact, even though rituals performed during the month of Muharram creatively adapted to Indian customs, very strong thematic ties to Iran remained.
In South Asia, the Iranian root concept of spatial separation between private and public aspects of the rite remained intact, even while localized rituals developed to express grief for Husayn by creatively incorporating indigenous customs (‘ādat). In South Asia, the ta‘zi̅yah procession (julūs) became the most popular display of public veneration or, alternatively, celebration during the month of Muharram, while the tradition of the majlis (mourning assembly) became a private expression of grief par excellence for the Shi‘ah. Although they remain separate, the interrelated nature of private and public forms of observance is a central theme in South Asia as it is in Iran.
Muḥarram as a regular observance did not become widely established in precolonial India until Mughal times (beginning in 1526 C.E.).8 But aside from Lucknow, the major Shi‘i center in India, where an elaborate muḥarram-centered ritual complex developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the royal patronage of the Navabs of Avadh, the observances never took a fixed form.9 This is in part because aside from the Navabi period (1720–1856 C.E.) of Lucknow, there was never a strong Shi‘i power base to facilitate fixed observance.10 Further, a canonical source for the standardization of observances does