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ID: 085018

Moral competition and the thrill of the spectacular: reconunting catastrophe in colonial Bombay / Green, Nile

Green, Nile	Journal Article
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Publication

2008.

Summary/Abstract

At 10:15 on the night of 31 May 1903, the D-block of the recently completed Sita Ram Building in Bombay suddenly came down with a crash. Most of the building was unoccupied, but on the ground floor was a saloon bar, which over the past months had done a brisk trade with British soldiers and sailors. The customers of this bar comprised most of the dead and injured when the building collapsed. Since the bar stood across the road from the tomb of a Muslim saint, rumours spread that the disaster was the direct result of the insult to the holy man and implicitly of the transgression of Muslim space by the combined efforts of the Hindu bar-owner and his bibulous patrons. This short essay explores the moral tensions that found expression with the collapse of the Sita Ram Building through a comparison of its reportage in an English-language newspaper and an Urdu hagiography of the offended saint. At the same time, it draws attention to the neglected importance of colonial Bombay as a prime location of the early Muslim experience of globalising modernity

Key Words

Globalisation ; Bombay ; Muslims ; Communalism ; Cosmopolitanism ; Religious Violence ;
Agency ; Saints ; Moral Conflict

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ID: 083599

Popular culture and religious metaphor: saints and shrines in Wakhan region of Tajikistan / Iloliev, Abdulmamad

Iloliev, Abdulmamad	Journal Article
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Publication

2008.

Summary/Abstract

The article focuses on the study of the Ism'?l? saints (awliy) andshrines (qadamgh) in the Wakhan region of Tajikistan along with their historical context. Its essential purpose is to draw a succinct historical and ethnographic picture of shrine culture in the region and determine its religious significance in the broad frame of socio-cultural context of Wakhan. While discussing rituals associated with saint veneration and shrine visitation, it elaborates on the changing role of shrine culture in modern Wakhan and its adaptation to the newly established social and cultural circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is argued that the process of religious and cultural revival in post-Soviet Wakhan had its own distinctive element manifested in the transformation of the existing shrines into museums or 'museumization' of shrines, a process that not only changed the spatial compositions of the shrines but also enhanced their social and cultural functions.

Key Words

Wakhan ; Saints ; Shrines ; Museum-shrine ; Islam

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