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INTRODUCTION
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Introduction Though I may be asleep, you are in my thoughts, Though I may be awake, you are in my heart. —Husain Vaʿez Kashefi The young widow who has broken her bangles and removed her nose ring in grief, and the youthful groom whose hands and feet have been decorated with blood rather than the traditional bridal mehndī (henna)—such images are repeatedly invoked in the everyday practices and hagiographical literature of the Shiʿi Muslim community in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. On the seventh day of the Muslim month of Muharram, Indian Shiʿa traditionally observe the tragic battlefield wedding at Karbala, Iraq, in 680 C.E. of eleven-year-old Fatimah Kubra, the daughter of the third Imam, Husain, and her thirteen-year-old cousin, Qasem, son of the second Imam, Hasan. On this day, in the mourning assemblies (majlis-e ʿazā) held in Hyderabad’s Old City, the battlefield heroics of Qasem and the tragic fate of the young bride/widow Fatimah Kubra are recounted in marṡiya (mourning poems) and in the speeches of the orators, known as ẕākir (fem., ẕākirah). The performed remembrances of these events in the mourning assemblies depict scenes of joy, followed by the rending grief a woman experiences in her abrupt transformation from fortune-bearing wife to inauspicious widow, a particularly traumatizing change in status for women in India, where everyday Muslim culture has adopted the Hindu taboo of widow remarriage. What is most striking about the descriptions of the Karbala wedding and its aftermath is that a distinctively Indian worldview is expressed. This book is a multidisciplinary ethnographic study of how hagiographical texts and performance commemorating the Battle of Karbala shape both spiritual and everyday life and practice in an Indian Shiʿi community. Devotional texts and ritual performances are integrally entwined, producing the desired effects of grief. More important, these performances also dynamically embody the social, ethical, and religious powers of the hero(in)es of 2 | INTRODUCTION Karbala, transforming them into imitable exemplars. The hagiographical texts and ritual performance of the mourning assembly are forms of moral communication in which the imagination of Karbala and the familyof Imam Husain generates shared sensibilities and an ethical worldview that orders the life of South Asian Shiʿa. Both poetryand prose commemorating the sacrifice of Imam Husain and his family at the Battle of Karbala hold central places in the spiritual and everyday lives of the Shiʿa in India and throughout the Islamic world. Hagiographies constitute a type of sacred biography extolling a saint’s piety and spiritual achievements. This book examines the pivotal function of hagiography as it mediates local social values and defines gendered action through public performance in the majlis (mourning assembly). The stories of the saints of Karbala narrated in hagiographical texts and represented in the rituals of the mourning assembly amplify the actions and words of the protagonists of Karbala while rooting them in a culturally relevant social, geographical , and linguistic milieu. In this progression, these idealized figures become saints and heroes, and their lived example as it is remembered in the hagiographical texts and ritual performances guide the listener to cultivate an idealized South Asian Shiʿi self. Particular events and moments in the life cycle receive special emphasis in the Karbala drama, and theyare expressed in dramatic, emotion-inducing vignettes during the majlis performance. Mourning assembly poets’ and speakers’ experiences affect how they imagine Karbala for their audiences. One of the most popular subjects for poets and majlis orators is the battlefield wedding of Fatimah Kubra and Qasem. Of the many events that comprise the Shiʿi ritual calendar, this particular scene endures in its popularity among majlis orators and everyday Shiʿa because marriage is both an Islamic imperative and one of the most charged life-cycle events in South Asian culture . In South Asian Hindu and Muslim communities, marriage remains nearly universal and usually arranged, and the bride’s family customarily provides a sizable dowry. South Asian marriage practices are furthercomplicated by the taboo against widow remarriage, which makes this a life-cycle event that is fraught with risk for both men and women. In the course of my fieldwork, in both structured interviews and casual conversations, women often described their commitment to marriage as being based on the model provided by Fatimah Kubra, who sacrificed her husband to preserve her religion . Here we can see the formative if not coercive nature of Shiʿi hagiogra- [54.225...