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| 1 |
ID:
118920
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines how local and transnational developments converged in 1857 to transform European attitudes towards Indian inhabitants in Singapore. Recognized in preceding years as useful to the security and the development of the colony, by late 1857, Indians in Singapore had come to be viewed by Europeans as a 'menace'. That change in disposition was largely the product of factors extraneous to the actions of the local Indian inhabitants themselves. Besieged by news of multiple challenges to the British Empire, European nerves were rattled by perceived threats emanating from sections of the Asian populace in Singapore. In early 1857, a dispute between Tamil-Muslims and Europeans brought to the fore the latter's anxieties and prejudices. That episode was followed, in May, by news of the massive rebellion of native troops in India. The emerging distrust for Indians was exacerbated by public rumours and fanned by editorials and reports published in the local press. Perceptions of immediate danger from the colony of transported convicts, and the fear of an Indian conspiracy during Muharram, sparked a panic that would have ramifications on the position of Indians in Singapore and leave an imprint on the long term political development of the Straits Settlements
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| 2 |
ID:
152348
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I examine how Old Delhi’s Shias construct community across religious and sectarian lines to live with others in contemporary India. I focus on the Islamic month of Muharram, when Shias ritually mourn the death of Imam Husain and his companions at the Battle of Karbala. Often a period marked by sectarian violence and tension in South Asia, here I focus on everyday attempts to bridge difference, diffuse tensions, and enable broader understandings of community amongst Old Delhi’s Muslims, and between Muslims and Hindus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst diverse groups of Muslims residing in Old Delhi, I examine how religious practices and narratives during and immediately after Muharram, provide an arena for new ways of positioning Shias in Old Delhi, and in India today. I argue that Shii rituals and narratives during Muharram, while marking religious and sectarian distinctions, simultaneously enable forms of identity that challenge exclusionary constructions of community and nation and allow Old Delhi’s diverse communities to live with difference in contemporary India.
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| 3 |
ID:
177802
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| Summary/Abstract |
The rule of the Qajar dynasty was a vibrant period for the Iranian taʿziyeh tradition; the genre’s anonymous dramatists not only developed the verse of the central plays of the Karbala cycle but innovated new narrative content. This study investigates one such innovation, the curious appearance of two new characters in the climactic play The Martyrdom of Imam Husain. They are the Dervish of Kabul and Sultan Qais of India, both of whom Husain encounters shortly before his martyrdom and neither of whom were previously mentioned in historical literature or religious traditions pertaining to Karbala. Through analysis of fifteen taʿziyeh renditions of Husain’s martyrdom dating from 1204/1790 to the 1950s, including rare manuscripts, this study provides a date window for the incorporation of these characters and argues that they were added to complete a trilogy of trials faced by Husain at Karbala. It also traces their literary origins and considers their social significance.
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| 4 |
ID:
126172
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The festival of Muharram had a central place in British colonial discourses on India as it was both a site of fascination and fear. While in textual discussions the fearsome aspect invariably came to the fore, in contemporaneous images of Muharram on magic lantern slides, on postcards or in film, fear was rarely depicted, although Muharram was never shown as being out of colonial control. Images tended to focus on Muharram as an attractive spectacle, with fear often located in the accompanying text. Between 1870 and 1915, the heyday of the Raj, visual economies in postcards and in film oversaw a transformation in representations of Muharram, in which the fear was displaced and the spectacle took centre stage, offering a fresh discourse around Muharram.
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| 5 |
ID:
151297
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| 6 |
ID:
169274
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| Summary/Abstract |
Research on the Shia in Scotland and of their spaces of worship and gathering continues to be under-represented in the research field of Muslims in Britain. According to the 2011 census, there are just under 77,000 Muslims in Scotland, with Edinburgh, its capital, home to about 12,400. This article aims to fill in some of these gaps by focusing on a Muharram procession emerging out of a Twelver Shia imambargah in Edinburgh. Drawing from fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2013, the article provides an ethnographic account of this annual jaloos (ritual procession) in Leith district, examines its evolution, and analyses the jaloos’s signage and related proclamations in English and Urdu. In juxtaposing these elements, I argue that even as the procession is a normative means to commemorate and transmit the core values of the Twelver Shia through the events of Karbala, it actively engages with and responds to stereotypes about Muslims in the West and thus serves simultaneously as a wider public presentation on, and defence of, Islam. By closely examining these Muslims’ public performance of Islam, this article offers a case study of an alternative narrative of Muslims in Britain and sheds new light on the rituals and experience of the Twelver Shia in Scotland.
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