Anand Vivek Taneja

Jinnealogy

Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Anand Vivek Taneja is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. November 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 149mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 485g
• ISBN-13: 9781503603936
• ISBN-10: 1503603938
• Artikelnr.: 47778634

Autorenporträt

Anand Vivek Taneja is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Walking Away from the Theater of History
chapter abstract
The introduction begins with an ethnographic anecdote of a man who walks
away from a historical play being staged in the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla
and is stopped short by the invisible voice of a Muslim saint. This
anecdote becomes the allegorical frame through which the book is
introduced. The introduction sketches out the history of Delhi from the
late 18th century to the contemporary period, but more importantly argues
that for those who come to Firoz Shah Kotla, it is not the past as history
that is important, but more importantly, the past as holding open
potentialities for life, for the present and the future.
1Jinnealogy: Archival Amnesia and Islamic Theology in Post-Partition Delhi
chapter abstract
This chapter brings together oral history accounts, popular Urdu
theological literature, and files from the Record Room of the ASI to bring
together two parallel tracks; the growing presence of the jinn in
post-Partition Delhi and the institutionalized amnesia of the official
archives concerning everything prior to Partition and Independence in 1947.
The chapter shows how the jinn are increasingly present in the blank spaces
of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the
judiciary and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state attempt
vast erasures of the city's Muslim landscapes, and how jinnealogy, the
supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn,
challenges the magical amnesia of the state by allowing for other
temporalities and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of
the bureaucratic present.
2Saintly Visions: The Ethics of Elsewhen
chapter abstract
Drawing upon ethnographic accounts from Firoz Shah Kotla as well as Urdu
literary evocations of Delhi's ruin-scape, this chapter demonstrates how
the experience of the sacred amidst these ruins is that of an immersion in
multiple times simultaneously, and a cessation of time's "flow". The
immersion in multiple times at ruins like Firoz Shah Kotla contains
transformative potential for the people who come here. Here, the
jinn-saints, often seen in visitors' dreams and visions wearing medieval
robes, embody another time, different from the frenetic time of the
contemporary city. This chapter shows how nineteenth-century colonial
violence imbued the ruin known as Pir Ghaib (the invisible saint) with
sacrality. This sacrality was linked to the nostalgic remembrance of the
exiled Mughal emperor and the lost political order of Mughal rule, deeply
tied to Sufi ethics and ideas of justice.
3Strange(r)ness
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the ethics of nameless intimacy at Firoz Shah Kotla,
where people who have known each other for twenty years or more seldom
acknowledge caste and religious identity, rarely learning one another's
proper names, referring to each other instead by nicknames and locational
epithets. It shows how this ethics of namelessness points us towards a Sufi
culture of gharib-navazi (hospitality to strangers) that is central to the
healing power attributed to dargah spaces. The anonymity afforded by
namelessness allows people to, even if temporarily, escape the often
oppressive structures of social and familial identity. This estrangement,
this making strange of the self, is the beginning of a process of
reinventing one's self and relation to the world. One aspect of this
process is expressing and acting on one's individual desires, even when
they violate the normative morality of family and community.
4Desiring Women
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses male-female interactions at Firoz Shah Kotla, where
unrelated men and women often sit together for hours, speaking of desire,
love, and loss. This is highly unusual in Delhi, a city with a reputation
for violence against women. Here, in a space of Islam, a religion
associated with a highly patriarchal order, women can be freer and more
open, in both their interactions with men and in talking about their
desires, than they can be in most public spaces in Delhi. Drawing on
letters written by women at Firoz Shah Kotla and comparing them to women's
voices as portrayed in pre-modern Rekhti poetry, it establishes a long
tradition of intimacy with Muslim saintly figures that has allowed women to
articulate individual longings and a sense of selfhood. It shows how the
anti-patriarchal potentialities of Islam have continued to coexist along
with the patriarchal juridical consensus.
5Translation
chapter abstract
This chapter begins with an ethnographic anecdote from Firoz Shah Kotla,
where one of the author's friends equated Sat Yug (The Hindu idea of a past
golden age) with contemporary Iraq. This was one of several moments in
which he brought together and made equivalent things otherwise separated by
vast temporal and conceptual distances. This chapter shows how we need to
expand the idea of translations beyond language and texts to understand
translation as a mode of being, which allows for the creation of shared
sacred landscapes, ethical worlds and domains of meaning across
conventional theological and communitarian divides. it discusses the
historical processes of translation through which popular Islam has become
an indistinguishable part of the ethical life of North India; the invisible
religion which underlies the visible religious differences between Hinduism
and Islam.
6Stones, Snakes, and Saints: Remembering the Vanished Sacred Geographies of
Delhi
chapter abstract
This chapter draws on eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts of
prominent Sufi shrines in Delhi to show how these shrines were integrally
connected to the ecology of the city. The author follows these accounts
with his own visits to these sites in the contemporary city, where they
have been completely disconnected from the ecological. Through oral
histories, this chapter shows how this disconnect can be attributed to
colonial policy, post-colonial growth, and pollution, all of which have
radically changed the ontology of the sacred in the city from one of
immanence, embedded in the local landscape, to one of immaterial
transcendence. Only at a few sites like Firoz Shah Kotla, protected from
development by archaeological policy, is an older memory and modality of
the sacred still possible. The remembrance of older relations to the
ecology includes the sanctification of the animals encountered in this
space.
7The Shifting Enchantments of Ruins and Laws in Delhi
chapter abstract
This chapter draws upon files from the post-colonial ASI, newspaper
reports, and conversations with conservationists active in contemporary
Delhi. It outlines a genealogy of conservation practice in Delhi and its
changing relation to the life of the city, from the early twentieth century
to the present. In the early twentieth century, for both British
conservationists and Indo-Muslim antiquarians, these ruins were enchanted
spaces, imaginative gateways to an otherwise irrecoverable Mughal past. The
identification of Delhi's ruin-scape with Muslim sovereignty led to violent
attacks on these sites during Partition violence, and this violence
fundamentally changed the city's relation to its Muslim past. In the
post-colonial era, Muslim monuments became spaces of darkness and death
where no signs of (religious) life were permitted.
Conclusion: Remnants of Despair; Traces of Hope
chapter abstract
The author traces his autobiographical exploration of and investment in the
ruin-scape of Delhi, and his concern that the forms of life indexed by
these ruins seem impossible to recover for the majority of the contemporary
city. This chapter looks at recent examples of jinn veneration from Lahore,
an analysis of a recent Bombay film, and new conservation paradigms taking
root in Delhi to think about how the rituals, ethics, and human and animal
relations at Firoz Shah Kotla connect to wider trends in South Asia. The
new conservation paradigms in Delhi wish to reconnect ruins to the human
life of the city, and also to the city's ecology. While this new paradigm
of preservation is secular, it shares remarkable similarities with the
"religious" outlook of people at Firoz Shah Kotla.