Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia

5. Religious Vows at the Shrine of Shahul Hamid

65 5 Religious Vows at the Shrine of Shahul Hamid VASUDHA NARAYANAN Women carrying flower garlands swarmed around me. Men and women carried little baskets of offerings. Some were putting cash and little silver representations of human organs into a large hundi, where one traditionally dropped “offerings.” People washed themselves in the tank with holy water or drew water from the sacred well and bathed themselves. Children and toddlers, with their newly shaved heads covered with sandalwood paste, ran through the courtyards; courtyards covered with stones donated by grateful devotees. It was only the murmuring of the Fatiha by a Muslim trustee as he said intercessory prayers for my welfare and the towering minarets that assured me that the physical and spiritual contexts for these activities was Muslim and not Hindu. “Make a promise,” urges the person saying the prayers; “promise the saint that if your wish is fulfilled you will come back and offer him ten times what you are giving now.” As I make the down payment, I look around. About half the pilgrims at this shrine seem to be Hindu; the other half Muslim. There seemed to be equal numbers of men and women; however, the trustees and their relatives who offered prayers, recited “mantras,” and tied protective amulets around the pilgrims’ wrists were all male Muslims. This is the famous Nagore dargah, the final resting place of Shahul Hamid (born c. 1491), more respectfully and commonly known as Nagore Andavar (“the ruler or Lord of Nagore”); Hazrath (“his excellency” or “the honorable one”); Qutb (“pole, axis”), or Nayakar (Tamil: the “leader”), or just affectionately as Meeran (from the Persian mir or leader) Sahib. This is my first visit. I felt a sense of deja vu: I had just been to the Catholic Velankanni basilica about 66 Vasudha Narayanan twenty kilometers down the road and also by the seashore. This cathedral is devoted to deva mata (“the divine mother” or “mother of God,” a term referring to the Virgin Mary in south Indian Christianity). Not far off are the equally wellknown Hindu temples of Nagapattinam. Tiru Nagai is the traditional name for Nagapattinam and the Vishnu temple there was celebrated by Tirumangai Alvar, a poet-saint of the ninth/tenth century, and the temple to Shiva and Saturn (Sanisvara) at Tirunallaru draws hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims. There had been varying levels of disorganization in these institutions; but a remarkable structural similarity in pilgrim ritual activity was readily apparent. This perception has only been reinforced in all my subsequent trips. The pilgrims come from many parts of India, but the Tamil-speaking people and Tamil customs of veneration are easily discernible. They come to pray, to venerate, to give thanks, to petition, to glorify Nagore Andavar, Shahul Hamid Meeran Sahib, and the supreme being whose grace was manifested through his devotee. Shahul Hamid, whose tomb is in Nagore, is perceived as a saint embedded in the local cultural milieu. However, he is also connected with other Muslim figures in India and with Islamic centers of pilgrimage and saints in the Middle East. While the figure of Shahul Hamid and the town of Nagore are constructed in ritual as participating in all these intersecting realms, the texts that glorify Nagore seem to emphasize a uniquely Tamil milieu, and the Tamil linguistic and cultural identities are emphasized. Shahul Hamid, therefore, is a saint who is at once relevant to Tamil Muslims and yet connects them through his ancestor Muhiyudin Abd al Qadir al-Jilani (1078–1166) to the ancestral Middle Eastern Islam. This chapter will unpack the ritual context and performance of some votive exercises in the Nagore Dargah Sharif, in the coastal town of Nagore in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu state. The material is based primarily on the many visits made to the Nagore dargah (literally, “doorway”; refers usually to the burial place of saints) in the last few years, as well as on the wide variety of biographical works on Shahul Hamid and descriptions of Nagore. I will be paying particular attention to the many miracles credited to Shahul Hamid. It is based on these miracles and the conviction of Shahul Hamid’s “power” that many vows are undertaken and votive exercises performed. Recollection of the miracle, therefore, is at the heart of such rituals. I will initially relate the life of Shahul Hamid, then briefly talk about the kinds of votive rites one sees at the dargah, the model of a vow, and...