The numerical inferiority of the Indian Shi‘ah should suggest that while theology may have been relatively fixed, local custom was grafted onto central aspects of the Shi‘i observance to produce ritualistic forms not recognizable in Iran. Add to this the fact that Hindus and Sunnis also participate in various capacities, and we have an inevitable context for innovation, adaptation, and transformation. Nonetheless, a fairly strong core of motifs from the Shi‘i master narrative, kept vivid through mars̲i̅yah and other chanted traditions, has provided some continuity. The ritual traditions surrounding days seven through ten, the culmination of the observance marked with grand processions through the streets of cities, towns, and villages throughout South Asia, demonstrate the continuities quite well.
It is important to keep in mind that India was a religiously plural society during the Mughal period. The Muslim population in precolonial South Asia, though politically and economically powerful, was always a quantitative minority, and within this minority the Shi‘ah constituted only a small percentage of the total population. Muslims thus had to cope with the Hindu majority and its overwhelming culture. As a result, a number of Hindu influences crept into muḥarram. This is only natural because social encounter inevitably results in cultural mixing to create innovative hybrid forms of local practice. The same process already seems to have been occurring in ancient Persia, where an earlier generation of scholars attempted to locate the origins of the lamentations for Husayn in pre-Islamic rites of renewal and eulogized mourning for fallen heroes. The process of religious and cultural mixing continues in the Indian subcontinent but with a unique twist. The Shi‘ah of India had to cope with negotiating their forms of observance with Sunni varieties. Sunnis, it must be emphasized, also observe muḥarram, especially on the tenth, but do so for very different reasons. Ideological conflicts thus often erupt into physical violence between the numerous parties concerned.
To begin with, the concept of vicarious suffering, so prominent in Twelver Shi‘ism, has been somewhat alien to Hindu thought, even though the idea is present in Mahayana Buddhist texts concerning the bodhisattva ideal. Hindus also do not observe or commemorate religious occasions; rather, they celebrate and play them out in accordance with the doctrine of li̅lā (divine play). The disputed issue of celebration versus observance is a pervasive one in South Asia, but the debate is not solely an Indic innovation, because we have already seen that similar discourses periodically took place at the Shi‘i geographical core in Iran, as they do in many parts of the Muslim world. Concerning the proper way to observe and perform such rites, the eighth imām, however, provided very strict guidelines to observe ‘āshūrā’ with grief and weeping, which would be 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