In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India

Notes

259 Notes Introduction 1. For readers who know Urdu, an explanation is in order regarding the use of the term of address “Amma” rather than “Ammi” for mother. When I first met Amma, we called her Piranima (a term of address for the wife of a Sufi teacher/guru, pı̄r). I do not remember the exact point when we began calling her “Amma,” a Telugu term of address for mother. Many of both her Hindu and Muslim patients (Telugu and Urdu speakers) call her Amma rather than Ammi, and her own children use this term, “Amma,” when speaking to me about her. 2. Carl Ernst has pointed out the differences in meaning and connotation between the English word “saint” and the Arabic word “walı̄.” The latter literally means “friend of God.” “This relational or functional meaning contrasts with the term saint, which implies intrinsic holiness or sanctity as a personal quality. The Islamic tradition has no formal equivalent of the Catholic process of canonization of saints” (1997, 59). 3. The term “outside” [bāhar] refers to persons outside the regular healing community , those who are new to Amma’s healing room. Although Amma rarely took regular patients out of queue, I later observed that she routinely called in strangers, as she did us that first day. 4. While Amma does not “know” English, English words pepper her speech and that of others who come to the healing room. This is a common phenomenon among non-English-speakers in urban India, whose speech patterns are heavily influenced by television and movies. 5. That summer of 1994 had brought severe flooding to parts of south Georgia and a record-breaking summer rainfall to Atlanta. I am interested in the fact that Amma dreams in color, as related in her dream narratives. However, I am not certain of the implications of the color black here. Shii Muslims dress in black during the month of Muharram, and black clothing also identifies members of the Sophiyanarang Sufi silsilā [lineage]; but Amma made no direct reference to either of these traditions here. 6. I sometimes illustrated how these kinds of stereotypes about other cultures are common on all sides of the oceans by identifying some similarly misconstrued Indian stereotypes about Americans—one of these about which I have been regularly questioned in India is that American mothers cannot possibly love their children as much as Indian mothers do, indicated by the fact that our children (sons) do not stay with us after their marriage nor do they “take care of us in our old age.” Notes to pages 13–29 260 7. See Carl Ernst’s excellent discussion of the relationship of Sufism and Islam in his book The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (1997), particularly the preface and chapter 1. 8. Although I have no ethnographic data to support this, I would imagine that many Hyderabadi Muslims who travel back and forth to the Gulf as workers have become familiar with non–South Asian practices and views of Islam. Many of Amma’s disciples have worked in the Gulf and bring narratives of their personal experiences to her table. 9. When she read a manuscript version of this introduction, Laurie Patton referred me to Wendy Doniger’s use of a similar image of a railway roundhouse to think about a “roundhouse of myths,” the roundhouse as a site of intersecting traditions. Doniger observes that the roundhouse is “the place where all the tracks of a railway meet so that the trains may pass from any one track to any other track.” Similarly, “For mythologists the roundhouse of myths is a place that we must reach in order to get off our track and onto someone else’s track, but it is not a place to settle down into” (O’Flaherty 1988, 163). 10. I am grateful for the opportunity to think through some of the ideas in this section at a roundtable in which I participated on “The Case for Case Studies” at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1995. Other participants were Margaret Mills, Barbara Babcock, and Deborah Kapchan, all of whom have conducted extensive research on single individuals. 11. In Writing Culture, James Clifford had already articulated similar constraints of ethnographic research and writing that keep it from being objective (1986), but Abu-Lughod argues that he does not go far enough in the reflexive move in writing that he advocates. She has specifically criticized Writing Culture for its...