Karbala Beyond the Persianate: Theorizing Place in Indo-Shiʿism

When the soil (dhartī) of the Kaʿba grew boastful
Suddenly, from the heavenly Throne came a voice.
“Where within your borders is such healing dust?
Above you is Karbala, exalted in rank!
Karbala is the permanence of Muhammad’s religion.”

Rashid Shahidi, “Karbala, Come to the Best of Deeds” (1989, 16)

In his mourning poem nauḥah, to which South Asian Shiʿa perform self-flagellation (mātam) during the month of Muḥarram when the third Shiʿi Imam, Husain, was martyred at the battle of Karbala, in present-day Iraq in 680 ce, the Hyderabadi Indian poet Rashid Shahidi extolls the superiority of Karbala over the Kaʿba, in which direction all Muslims orient themselves for daily ritual prayers.^[1] Shahidi plays with Urdu words connected to the soil of the earth. In the first two lines of the stanza, the soil (dhartī) of the Kaʿba is juxtaposed with Karbala’s dust (khāk). The exalted status of Karbala’s dust, with its capacity to heal the sick, the downtrodden, and those in need of intercession, is contrasted to the soil of the Kaʿba, which the author claims lacks such qualities.

Shahidi’s nauḥah emphasizes Karbala’s pivotal role in Islamic history. The refrain “Karbala is the permanence of Muhammad’s religion” points to Shahidi’s implicit intertextual referencing of Shiʿi authoritative traditions that creates “a cosmological order in the lives of Shiʿa that is self-evident in the miracles it produces from the soil on which Imam Husain sacrificed his life” (Ruffle 2021, 91). Five of the 108 chapters in Ibn Qulawayh’s tenth-century pilgrimage guide to Imam Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb Kāmil al-ziyārat (Perfection of the Visitations) are dedicated to its sacred soil, its collection, prayers, and how it should be consumed for healing purposes (Ruffle 2021, 91). Shahidi’s nauḥah makes intertextual reference to an incident in which the sixth Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq condemned the Kaʿba for boasting of its superiority over Karbala:

Imam Sadiq (a.s.) said: The land of the Kaʿaba once said in pride, “Who is like me, Allah has built His house on me, people from far come to me and I have been chosen as Allah’s sanctuary.”

Allah revealed to it: “Keep quiet and calm down! I swear by My Glory and Magnificence that your honor compared to the honor which I have granted to the land of Kerbala is like a drop of water on a needle dipped in the sea.

If it was not for the dust of Kerbala, I would not have honored you. If it was not for that which is held in the land of Kerbala, I would not have created you nor would I have created the house about which you boasted.” (Ibn Qulawayh 2010, 288–89; quoted in Ruffle 2021, 91)

Rashidi’s nauḥah parallels Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq’s narration of God chastising the Kaʿba for boasting of its claim to superiority over the dust of Karbala. The Kaʿba is informed in no uncertain terms that Karbala existed prior to the creation of God’s House on Earth (the Kaʿba). In another line of the nauḥah, Shahidi asks, “In what realm is the like of this dust to be found?” (Shahidi 1989, 16), indexing Karbala’s existence in the Divine pre-Creation, and brought into human awareness with the first prophet Adam. According to Shiʿi tradition, from Adam onward the prophets passed through Karbala and expressed an unrequited grief for the suffering that Imam Husain and the family of the Prophet Muhammad, the Ahl-e Bait, would experience at this place in 680 ce.

Not only is the dust of Karbala existent in pre-creation and miraculous for its healing powers, but it also exudes the scent of musk (misk). We have a tradition related on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbas in which he and ʿAli were returning from the battle of Siffin (657) and they passed over Karbala, where the Imam experienced a traumatic moment of prognostication for the torments that awaited his son just a couple of decades later at this very spot. After sleeping fitfully, ʿAli woke from a dream and told of heavenly promises for him and his family, despite their earthly suffering. He began to search for the dung of a small herd of gazelles^[2] (āhū)^[3] under some palm trees as he had been instructed by his heavenly visitors. Locating it, he dug up the yellowed substance and smelled it. ʿAli cried out to Ibn ʿAbbas, “By God that is it! Jesus the son of Mary had smelled it before.”

According to Imam ʿAli, Jesus one day passed with his disciples through Karbala and on that spot, they saw a group of gazelles gathered together weeping. Jesus and his disciples sat and wept with them, without the disciples knowing the reason for that lamentation. Jesus finally told them that this was a spot on which was to be killed the young descendant (farkh) of the Apostle Ahmad, and child of the pure, unblemished virgin (batūl) [Fatimah] who is like my mother. He [Husayn] shall be buried in this spot whose soil (ṭīnah) is more fragrant than musk. For it is the burial place of the martyr [Husayn]. Such is the soil containing the bodies of prophets and descendants of prophets.

Jesus then told his disciples that these gazelles had told him that they had been grazing in that place out of longing for the soil that was to contain the remains of the “blessed shoot” of the Prophet Muhammad. The gazelles told Jesus that they were safe from all dangers in that place. Jesus then took a few pellets of the gazelles’ manure and smelled them saying, “Behold the manure of these gazelles has such sweet odors because of the grass of this place. Preserve it therefore, O Lord, that his [Husayn’s] father may also smell it, so that it may be for him a consolation and a relief.” (Ayoub 1978, 237–38)

This story of Jesus’s grief is instructive; it foretells of the place of Imam Husain’s martyrdom at Karbala, where its dust (khāk) and clay (t̤īnah)^[4] is redolent with the odor of musk (Grami 2013, 43). Fragrant, uncorrupted corpses are associated with martyrdom and sainthood—both of which Imam Husain exemplifies. The transcendent, saintly, incorruptible body of the Imam, even in its deceasement, brings devotees into the presence of the promise of Paradise through Karbala’s materiality, specifically in the form of its dust (khāk) or clay (t̤īnah), and the cultural memory of Muḥarram.

Rashid Shahidi’s nauḥah exalting Karbala’s dust over the Kaʿba’s sand, as well as the Shiʿi authoritative traditions on which it draws, focuses on Karbala as place. Shiʿi history is one in which the emplacement of Karbala is set in a multi-stepped temporal sequence: (1) The existence of Karbala in pre-Creation; (2) Karbala prior to 680 ce as a site of grief and visitation (ziyārah) by the prophets and Ahl-e Bait; (3) the historical site of Imam Husain’s martyrdom in 680 ce; (4) the site of Husain’s shrine-tomb and center of pilgrimage for devotees; and (5) the site of cultural memory that is transplaced through diverse forms of material devotion by Shiʿa.

Karbala beyond the Persianate, Karbala as axis mundi

Mircea Eliade (1963) considered the relationship of time and history in relationship to space. His spatial analysis focused on the separation of sacred and profane space along what he called the “earth axis” or axis mundi (Korom 1992, 108), which link together heaven, earth, and the underworld (hell). Eliade notes that communication with heaven is expressed through such metaphors as the pillar, ladder, mountain, or vine (Eliade 1963, 37). In the context of Karbala, I suggest the Eliadian metaphor be extended to include a chain to conceptualize the Shiʿi axis mundi as a context-specific communicative mode. The chain of prophecy from Adam through Muhammad followed by the Imams constitutes this Shiʿi communicative link. Shiʿi tradition accords the message of Imam Husain’s martyrdom to the place of Karbala, which is associated with the prophets, each of whom were attracted to this site of pre-eternal suffering. In the Eliadian model of the axis mundi, Karbala is the “center of the world,” a place with delimited boundaries defined specifically by the extent to which its sacred soil reaches from the tomb and the holy body it inters; what lies beyond is profane space that “engulfs the sacred home territory” and is chaos (Korom 1992, 107).

For South Asian Shiʿa, as for others living in other parts of the Shiʿi world, Karbala is the “center of the world.” Karbala is the place where Imam Husain was martyred; it is the place where Husain is entombed, and where the faithful may go to visit him to enter into his presence to seek spiritual comfort, healing, and intercession for myriad needs. For Shiʿa living in geographically distant and culturally different contexts, Karbala as place is adapted through material forms, as well as textual and ritual, that make the “semantic universe” of a community “made not only visible but permanent and transmittable” (Assmann 2006, 70). Operating beyond mere functionality, “second-level formalization serves, within the sphere of objects of everyday life, as a principle of connectivity, stabilizing and transmitting cultural knowledge and symbolizing norms, values, and myths that constitute collective identity” (ibid., 70).

My concept of everyday Shiʿism reflects Assmann’s concept of how particular communities create and transmit the semantic world of Karbala and the memory of Imam Husain and the family of the Prophet Muhammad, the Ahl-e Bait, through material culture and a focus on place. The South Asian Shiʿi everyday is based on the ritual and material transplacement of Karbala to the subcontinent, by which time and space is collapsed between the historically and geographically distant site where Imam Husain and the Ahl-e Bait lived and died. As I have noted elsewhere, “Shiʿa living in the region that comprises the Indian subcontinent inhabit multiple worlds. Their religious sensibilities are shaped by Islamic laws and norms, the cultural memory of the events of Karbala, and a South Asian or Indic grammar of religion that animates devotional practices and traditions to the Imams and Ahl-e Bait, which I refer to as Indo-Shiʿism” (Ruffle 2021, 12). Indo-Shiʿism allows for multiple levels of context specificity, notably the give-and-take of the broader religio-cultural milieu in which Shiʿa settled in the subcontinent, which shaped religious practice in the longue durée. Indo-Shiʿism also accounts for the cultural specificity of such factors as regional affiliation, ethnicity, linguistic register, caste and status, gender values, and lifecycle in shaping individual and community identities. I argue such specificity is necessary to understand how Muslim (in this case, Shiʿi) communities connect emotionally and imaginatively to the past through material and ritual forms that are mediated by both religion, culture, and a sense of place (Ruffle 2021, 8).

In what follows, I examine two paradigms that have shaped two broad fields of study, the Islamic/ate in the academic study of Islam and the Persianate in Iranian and South Asian studies. I juxtapose my analysis of the Islamic/ate and the Persianate with the role of place in Shiʿi ritual and material culture in South Asia. I introduce three case studies of Indo-Shiʿi transplacement of Karbala to the subcontinent through material practice and built space. The first case study focuses on the establishment of a karbalā burial ground in Hyderabad by Mir Muhammad Muʾmin Astarabadi during the reign of the Shiʿi Qutb Shahi sult̤ān, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1612); the second examines the hybrid built space and burial ground of the Karbalā Talkatora rauẓah built in 1800 Lucknow by Mir Khuda Bakhsh during the reign of Nawab Saʿadat ʿAli Khan; and the third case study concentrates on the taʿziya as a type of portable Shiʿi built space that emplaces Imam Husain’s shrine-tomb in local context that establishes his presence through processional rituals and acts of auspicious reciprocal gazing during Muḥarram. In reviewing scholarly approaches to the Islamic/ate and the Persianate in relation to my selected case studies, I hope to point out the limits of such models for accounting for Indo-Shiʿi spatial and material practice.

The religion-culture cleavage in the Islamic/ate model

Marshall Hodgson defines “Islam” as the “religion of the Muslims” (1974, I:58), which receives further definition in the adjective “Islamic” to refer to that which is “of or pertaining to Islam in the proper, the religious sense” (ibid., I:59).^[5] Shahab Ahmed notes Hodgson’s definition of the religion of Islam as being encompassed by “any life-orientational experience or behavior: focused on the role of a person in an environment felt as cosmos; a focus which normally entailed some experience of the numinous and/or some notion of cosmic transcendence, and efforts to respond thereto” (Hodgson 1974, 362; quoted in Ahmed 2016, 160). Phenomena unaccounted for by “life-orientational experience” and “cosmic transcendence” fall under the rubric of “personal piety” for Hodgson. Expressive forms such as literature, architecture, and philosophy “become less and less properly Islam or Islamic: they eventually move from religion to culture and become Islamicate” (Ahmed 2016, 162). Hodgson coined the neologism “Islamicate” to account for Islam and its culture. The Islamicate, according to Hodgson, refers “not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims” (1974, I:59). The Islamicate exceeds Islam because Hodgson’s definition is so exceedingly narrow, limiting it to the realm of “personal piety,” the definition of which is subjective, singular, and excludes collective experience and expressiveness.^[6]

Shahab Ahmed (2016) engages in a sustained analysis of Bruce B. Lawrence’s promotion of the concept of Islamicate civilization in undergraduate teaching (and by extension, our scholarship). Ahmed critiques Lawrence’s civilizational model as an effort to “institutionalize” the difference between the Islamic and the Islamicate, in which “pre-categorization of Islam as religion—and thus as belief, ritual, doctrine, law and sameness—is accepted without demur, anything beyond this, anything that exceeds this—that is, history and society, ethics and difference—is Islamicate” (Ahmed 2016, 172). Lawrence makes a celebratory declaration, “To teach Islamicate civilization is to recognize, explore, and celebrate an Asian dimension in the lived experience of Muslim peoples. . . . Most Muslims are Asian, and Islamicate civilization, like Muslim demography, derives its central focus, and determinative profile, from Asia” (Lawrence 2003, 63; italics added). The problem with Lawrence’s calculus is that Asian Muslims are denied Islam as a religion; their lived experience is accessible through its cultural production in the domain of the Islamicate, that is, in a space of alterity.

Islam as religion, inscribed by “belief, ritual, doctrine, [and] law,” reflects the Sunni normative tradition as it took shape in the Arab world where Islam took shape. Narrowly limiting a definition of Islam as religion to a type of personal piety shaped by belief, ritual, doctrine, and law, we must ask several qualifying questions about this Islam as it is imagined by the scholar. Limiting Islam to a particular expression of personal piety excludes collective practice, the emotional and imaginative contours of everyday religion, and its relationship with normative traditions of authority. Pre-categorizing Islam as religion renders it monolithic, pushing those who are non-Arab and non-Sunni to the periphery.

Just as Hodgson’s definition of “Islam” tends to reduce Muslims to a Sunni Arab paradigm, so too does his concept of the Islamic rely on an overly circumscribed definition of religion. According to Hodgson, “The adjective, ‘Islamic’, correspondingly, must be restricted to ‘of or pertaining to’ Islam in the proper, the religious, sense. . . . When I speak of ‘Islamic literature’ I am referring only to more or less ‘religious’ literature, not to secular wine songs, just as when one speaks of Christian literature one does not refer to all the literature produced in Christendom” (Hodgson 1974, I:59). Why can’t wine songs that might use religious themes to invoke the divine, as well as to describe the beauty of the youthful male beloved, draw from the same normative, textual traditions that inform different genres of praise poems such as the qaṣīdah, ḥamd, naʿt, or manqabat? The exclusion of everyday religion from such definitions of Islam fails to account for the diverse religious worlds of Muslim individuals and communities in historical, social, and cultural context. I describe elsewhere the everyday as an inclusive space that recognizes both women and men as active participants in religious life and practice without relegating women to the “popular” and men to the “scholarly” spheres (Ruffle 2021, 7). The everyday transcends mere classification as folklore or popular religion, that is culture, which leads to the essentializing and exclusivist binaries of popular-elite, grassroots-scholarly, and female-male that deny on-the-ground realities (ibid., 7).

“Map is not territory”: Materiality and place in Indo-Shiʿism

Bruce Lawrence contends the history of premodern Islam in Asia is both Persianate and Islamicate (2003, 63). Like the Islamicate, the Persianate exceeds itself, transcending language and those who identify as speakers of Persian, particularly in the subcontinent. The Persianate exists within the realm of culture, where the Islamicate is likewise situated. Despite the Persianate and Islamicate being neologisms coined by Hodgson to account for cultural phenomena beyond Islam as religion, Lawrence notes a critical lack of nonequivalence between these two terms (ibid., 65). Conceived through the concept of adab, custom, the cultural and social norms individuals and communities construct in particular moments and places give rise to competing and contestive voices. Lawrence writes regarding this dissonant equivalence:

In examining a range of sociocultural norms lumped together under the term “adab,” one might use the qualifier Persianate, if one wants to stress the importance of Persian as a linguistic component, or Islamicate, if one wants to acknowledge the way in which Islam itself was invoked even when the connection between cultural observance and religious loyalty proves to be very slim. Persian poetry written by Turks, Persian paintings produced by Indians, Persian monumental architecture built by Mongols—all have Islamicate dimensions, yet are not restricted to a specific religious audience or a precise ritual usage. Even when Persianate and Islamicate seem to converge, they express complimentary excesses: Persianate connotes more than linguistic usage, just as Islamicate connotes more than creedal commitment, ritual performance, or juridical loyalty. (Lawrence 2003, 65; italics added)

It is the very excessiveness of these categories that makes them confound. Why not simply acknowledge the embeddedness of culture in religion? When does Persian no longer belong to Persians?

Nile Green and his interlocutors map “the various ‘frontiers’ of Persian—in the linguistic, geographical, and social senses of the term. . . . By focusing on ‘horizontal’ geographical frontiers and ‘vertical’ social encounters, on routes and roots, this book seeks to identify the limits—indeed, the breaking points—of Persian’s usefulness as a medium of information, understanding, and affinity” (2019, 1). Green gives equal attention to Persianate culture at its “frontiers” in China, Central Asia, and Ottoman Turkey, expanding “the spatial parameters of the Persianate world to the broader Eurasian geography of Persian-based language contact” beyond Iran and India, which have traditionally been imagined as the core of this linguistic and cultural zone (ibid., 9). The Persianate is defined by Green as an “interregional or ‘world’ system generated by shared knowledge or religiosity, statecraft, diplomacy, trade, sociability, or subjectivity that was accessed and circulated through the common use of written Persian across interconnected nodal points of Eurasia” (ibid., 9). In 1999, Bert Fragner presented “Persophonia” (Persophonie) as an alternative to Hodgson’s Persianate model. Fragner’s Persophonia distinguishes “between Persian as a ‘mother tongue’ (Muttersprache) and as a ‘second language’ (Zweitsprache)” (Fragner 1999, 1; quoted in Green 2019, 4). Eurasia is mapped as a multilingual space in which Persian is the primary contact language that links people cross-regionally and across multiple cultural zones. Persian is the linguistic tool that transcends geographical space. One limitation with Fragner’s reconceptualization of the Persianate is its overemphasis on Persian as a spoken language, a lingua franca, while little attention is given to Persian in its written forms, or “Persographia” (Green 2019, 4). Brian Spooner and William Hanaway emphasize Persian as “a written contact language,” or Persographia, constitutive of a “social practice and cultural technology that was, crucially, ‘anchored in stable forms of writing.’ . . . Persian [was] a stable written koine used by specific professional groups” (Spooner and Hanaway 2012, xi; quoted in Green 2019, 5). The tendency to impose such binaries as Persophonia and Persographia reflects the maxim “the map is not territory” (Smith 1978, 309), in which as scholars we presume the social worlds in which written and spoken Persian operated can be ranked hierarchically.

Green next surveys Shahab Ahmed’s 2016 monograph, which offers perhaps the most systematic critique of Hodgson’s concepts of the Islamicate and the Persianate. Green is critical of Ahmed’s “Balkans-to-Bengal complex,” which he describes as a “rebranded version of the ‘eastern Islamic world,’” thus neglecting to seriously consider the Persianate as a zone of cultural exchange (2019, 6). Green contends, “As with nationalistic models, this brings us again to the importance of recognizing and examining ‘frontiers’, whether they be linguistic, spatial, social, or in this case, religious in form. To test the limits of Persian is to trace its fortunes in the interstitial space of these various types of boundaries” (ibid., 6). It is precisely in this interstitial space at the frontier of South Asian Shiʿi practices of material and ritual place-making that I seek to map out the context specificity of a paradigm such as Indo-Shiʿism.

The primary limitation of the Persianate (and Perso-Turkic) according to Ahmed is that “they assumptively privilege linguistic and ‘ethnic’ elements, suggesting that it is these eponymous factors that are somehow the distinguishing and generative source of the phenomenon at stake” (Ahmed 2016, 84). The Persianate is rooted in Persian language and ethnicity, which Ahmed describes as the “constitutive and definitive genius of the shared Islamic paradigm of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex” in which Muslims of the premodern period lived (ibid., 84). Ahmed proposes “Balkans-to-Bengal” as an alternative paradigm that resists the ethnonationalism embedded in Persian and Arabic linguistic and literary models. The Balkans-to-Bengal complex is conceptualized by focalizing Islam as a “locally polyglot religion,” understood through the histories of individual Muslims and communities (ibid., 84–85). In the Balkans-to-Bengal complex, the map makes the territory because context matters.

The final reformulation of the Persianate from Green’s introduction that I discuss comes from Stefano Pellò (2012). In The Parrots of India, Pellò argues that in the Mughal courts, Persian became an important social tool of intercultural communication for people of different religious and caste groups forming a Persianate “cosmopolitanism” (Green 2019, 7). Green cautions linking the Persianate to totalizing models such as cosmopolitanism with its tendency to generalize, instead directing the reader again to the “need to analytically denaturalize Persian’s civilizational ties to Islam and denationalize its primordialist ties to Iran. . . . Persian was as much the repository of stories of gurus and gods, and of the secular pleasures of the good life, as it was of Islamic ethics” (ibid., 7). The essays that comprise The Persianate World “document” Persian as the written language of court scribes, poets, religious scholars, anthologists, and commentators interacting with other local languages across Eurasian frontiers—not merely conceived in spatial-geographical terms but also crossing religious, aesthetic, ethnic, and creative boundaries (ibid., 9).

The Persianate straddles multiple conceptual models that privilege the traveling of Persians and the Persian language and its literatures across Eurasia. In the Islamicate we have a civilizational model based on essentialized, ahistorical conceptions of the enduring continuity and reification of Muslim identity enduring across geographical space and time. Situating language and literature in transregional space, Sheldon Pollock coined the term “Sanskrit cosmopolis” to explain “the diffusion of Indian culture across a vast swathe of South Asia between the fourth century and the fourteenth” (Eaton 2019, 10). Eaton argues that Persian, like Sanskrit, was a transregional language with “universal dominion” for the very reason that each language transcended religion and was “embraced by peoples of varied ethnic and religious backgrounds” (ibid., 13). The Persianate cosmopolis achieved its universality because of its explicit lack of affiliation with any one religious tradition, particularly Islam. If we consider the Balkans-to-Bengal complex conceived by Shahab Ahmed, it was Islam that bound together this medieval and premodern world, while for scholars such as Richard Eaton and Nile Green its frontiers are mapped by the universality of Persian and its explicit decoupling from religion.

The decoupling of the Persianate and religion is further developed by Mana Kia (2020). Kia follows Hodgson’s sociocultural paradigm of the Islamicate in conceptualizing Persianate formation in language and social practice prior to modern nationalist movements (ibid., 13). The Persianate produced a “history of commonality and intimacy” for Persians living in Central, South, and West Asia who “read the same corpus of well-known ethical, literary, and commemorative texts” (ibid., 9). Kia quotes Maria Szuppe, who describes premodern Asia as a shared cultural world where the Persian language “was the dominant idiom of literary expression, as well as from a common adherence to the Perso-Islamicate cultural-social system of education, behavior, and good manners, or adab, which provided a common basis for the educational and cultural references shared in particular by the literate middle and upper classes of society” (Szuppe 2011, 41; quoted in Kia 2020, 9). Kia builds on Szuppe’s argument that adab formed the common basis for the middle and elite classes of Persianate society. Being educated in aesthetic style and moral conduct (akhlāq)—what Kia refers to as “the two faces of adab”—made someone Persian (ibid., 9). Although the term “adab” with its emphasis on propriety of conduct and morality seems to imply a singular notion of what it means to be Persian, Kia is careful to clarify what constituted Persian and that Persian-ness was organic and diverse. Persians came from myriad professional communities; they were religious scholars, soldiers, courtiers, poets, and merchants, each with their own way of participating in the Persianate and expressing their Persian selves (ibid., 10). We might also ask about the extent to which individuals across Eurasia (or the Persianate world) identified themselves as Persian?

Adab’s diversity and multiplicity of meaning and interpretation contributed to what Kia refers to as its “aporetic character,” allowing for ideas to be “constituted relationally, so that the meanings of place and origin could be multiple and shifting” (ibid., 10). Persianate selves are multiple, they are shifting, and they might inhabit multiple places and claim loyalty and affiliation to overlapping lineages and order; it is a form of “aporia” (ibid., 10). Kia uses the term “aporia” in order “to underline the way in which seeming contradictions appear so through the lens of our present” (ibid., 11). Aporia seeks to dissolve oppositions and binaries to reveal the porosity of borders. Aporia resolves the tendency for us to set up categories as oppositional relations; instead they may serve to articulate one another’s state of being (ibid., 11).

Hodgson’s rigid definition of the Islamic/ate and the Persianate is an unresolved aporia with which the scholars surveyed in this section have struggled: the map is not the territory. The tension between the relationship of religion and culture in Islam undergirds Hodgson’s paradigms. Shiʿa, among others, inhabit multiple subjectivities, although I would argue that as a group they constellate around a fixed site of identity: Karbala. Jonathan Z. Smith’s final words in Map Is Not Territory reveal the disjunctions our scholarly models impose on how religious realities are perceived or experienced. Smith reflects, “We may have to relax some of our cherished notions of significance and seriousness. We may have to become initiated by the other whom we study and undergo the ordeal of incongruity. We need to reflect on and play with the necessary incongruity of our maps before we set out on a voyage of discovery to chart the worlds of other[s]” (Smith 1978, 309; italics added).

The spatial framework of cultural memory: Materializing place in Indo-Shiʿism

I critique the Islamic/ate and Persianate paradigms for the false sense of accommodativeness that even the tendency of aporia to blur the boundaries of binaries and categories cannot surmount. Fundamentally, the Persianate is primarily an ethnolinguistic model, the Islamic accommodates limited concepts of Muslim subjectivity, and the Islamicate binarizes religion and culture. For scholars working with minority Muslim communities, with material culture and ritual (the nontextual), and spatialized practices of religious memory, the Hodgsonian paradigms reinscribe conceptual categories that impute center-periphery boundaries.

The presumed universality of the Islamic/ate and Persianate paradigms is exemplified by Reza Masoudi Nejad’s observation regarding the semantic range of meaning of the word “taʿziya” as it is used across the Shiʿi world:

As the Shiʿi rituals were developed in different linguistic territories, some terms or names may have different meanings across Shiʿi communities. The Arabic taʿzyeh literally means mourning, so it refers to the mourning communities among Arab-speaking [sic] Shiʿa communities. In Iran, taʿzyeh refers to the passion play of Ashura by which a part of the Karbala tragedy is performed. However, the taʿzyeh is the symbolic dome of Hussein, which is carried through Muḥarram processions in India. (2012, 114)

In Arabic, taʿziya refers to acts of comfort, consolation, or condolence, all of which are sentimental and ideational in their orientation. The Iranian taʿziyeh,^[7] the dramatic re-enactment of Imam Husain’s martyrdom at the battle of Karbala, and the South Asian taʿziya, the replica (shabīh) of Imam Husain’s shrine-tomb, are ritual and material expressions of Shiʿi practices of remembering and condoling the Imam’s martyrdom (taʿziyeh) and making him present (taʿziya).

Shiʿa in India and Iran refer to these specific material, performative, and ritual taʿziyeh and taʿziya, respectively (see note 7). As homonyms, the words’ general meanings point to the role of mourning or consoling as a practice of making present the deceased or those who are physically absent and missed. The manifestations of grief for Imam Husain’s suffering at Karbala communicated by words such as “taʿziyeh” or “taʿziya” are expressed through different modalities of spatialized performances of Iranian and South Asian Shiʿi cultural memory. In what follows, I perform a place-focused analysis of three related forms of Indo-Shiʿi cultural memory with Karbala as its axis mundi. As mentioned earlier in this article, my three case studies are the Daʾira Mir Muʾmin karbalā ground in Hyderabad, the rauẓah of Karbalā Talkatora in Lucknow, and the portability of the built space and place of taʿziya. These case studies aim to demonstrate how Karbala transposes place in Indo-Shiʿi cultural memory because “no social process unfold[s] in the same way across different places, raising the significance of context” (Warf 2004, 298; quoted in Masoudi Nejad 2017, 2). For South Asian Shiʿa, “forms of place-making . . . produce and shape the materiality of place” (Kia 2020, 29). The processes by which Shiʿi communities in the Indian subcontinent have participated in place-making have been achieved through the melding of Islamic-Shiʿi and Indic religious practices, mores, and literary aesthetics, resulting in what I have termed “Indo-Shiʿism” (Ruffle 2020b, 290; 2021, 12, 31). Elsewhere I have described Indo-Shiʿism as the expression of the process of “how individual Shiʿi communities integrated cultural memory of Karbala and love for the Imams and Ahl-e Bait with local material culture, literary, votive, and architectural religious practices to create new expressions of ‘Indo-Shiʿism’, blending aspects of Indic and Shiʿi-Islamic religious sensibilities” (2021, 31).

Jan Assmann describes cultural memory as disembodied and preserved in symbolic forms. According to Assmann, “In order to work as a memory . . . its symbolic forms have not only to be preserved but also circulated and reembodied in a society. . . . As the objection runs, memory requires a mind” (2015, 331). Human memory, Assmann argues, is embedded, and requires “social and cultural frames for its embedment” (ibid., 332). Memory performs a metonymic function, “based on contact between a remembering mind and a reminding object” (ibid., 332). For Assmann, cultural memory is material, and it has normative bases, whether these be religious events, texts, architecture, monuments, or modes of learning and knowledge transfer (ibid., 332). Place and place-making likewise shape cultural memory.

A spatial framework of cultural memory is of central importance for understanding how Shiʿa are place-bound to Karbala. We know that Karbala exists as a historical and geographic site in Iraq where a battle took place in the seventh century, and where Imam Husain and many of his supporters lay buried today. Both points are factually correct; yet, what is the relationship of space to place? For a Shiʿa living in Beirut versus one living in Yazd or another living in Lucknow, how Karbala is remembered is conditioned by such factors as one’s cultural affiliation, linguistic register(s), geography, gender, social rank, and socioeconomic status. Places have a relational quality that shapes cultural memory. In his study of architecture and spatial theories of memory, Mattias Ekman calls for a shift from “how we remember space to those that look at for what reasons we remember space and at what we recall or associate by means of spatial remembrance” (2013, 8). In thinking about Indo-Shiʿi material practices of place-making Karbala in the subcontinent, the how, for what reasons, and by what means keep context at the forefront.

Every place is Karbala, every Karbalā is different

“Rather than being one definite sort of thing” writes Edward S. Casey, “for example, physical, spiritual, cultural, social, a given place takes on the qualities of its occupants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description, and expressing them in its occurrence as an event: places not only are, they happen” (1996, 27). Karbala assumes the quality of its most sacred occupant, Imam Husain, who lies buried within the soil God selected for this very purpose prior to Creation.

The saying attributed to the sixth Imam, Jaʿfar al-Sadiq, “every place is Karbala, every day is ʿAshura,” exemplifies a Shiʿi-oriented topophilia. “Every place is Karbala” merges an affective and physical bond to the place of Imam Husain’s martyrdom for Shiʿa. Karbala is not a distant abstract place located somewhere in history. In this section I focus on how Karbala assumed a place-oriented form and meaning in relation to Karbala’s soil. Karbalās are multivalent built spaces that collapse and transfer place between Imam Husain’s shrine tomb in Iraq and sites of cultural memory in the subcontinent.

Ibn Qulawayh, the tenth-century Iraqi traditionist and jurist (d. c. 978), wrote Kāmil al-ziyārāt (Perfection of the Visitations), a collection of ḥadīth offering guidance and etiquette in performing pilgrimage and prayer to the graves of the Prophet Muhammad, the Imams, Ahl-e Bait, and their descendants. A significant number of chapters of Ibn Qulawayh’s Kāmil al-ziȳarāt are devoted to the sanctity and healing power of Karbala’s greenish-yellow soil.^[8] Of the soil, Ibn Qulawayh writes:

God chose Karbalāʾ as a blessed haven twenty-four thousand years before He created the soil of the Kaaba and chose it as a sacred precinct. When God will shake the earth and move it, it will be as it is with its pure soil and be put in the best place in Paradise, to be the abode of none but the prophets and messengers or, according to some, the resolute among the prophets. It shall shine among the gardens of the inhabitants of Paradise like a twinkling star shines among the stars for the people of earth. Its light will cover the residents of Paradise and it will call out: “I am the good, blessed and sacred soil which has enveloped the lord of the martyrs and the lord of the young denizens of Paradise.” (Ibn Qulawayh [1356] 1937, 168; quoted in Sindawi 2012, 28–9)

This remarkable passage affirms Karbala as the Shiʿi axis mundi linking together heaven, earth, and hell, where those who caused Imam Husain and his family’s suffering are consigned on the Day of Judgment. This passage in Kāmil al-ziyārāt likewise promises that Karbala’s soil will be the best place in Paradise, where the “most resolute” of the prophets and God’s messengers will reside ([1356] 1937, 168), reminding devotees that prophetic history was set in motion to pass over the land of Karbala and share in the grief of the sufferings that would befall Husain on its soil. In this passage Ibn Qulawayh braids together place and time. Karbala as place is differentiated by its soil, Shiʿi conceptions of history, and the sacred individual(s) interred in its precincts (Tweed 2015, 225).^[9]

Places are sites of material action. Ibn Qulawayh’s account of Karbala’s existence in pre-Creation, as site of Imam Husain’s enshrinement in this world, and the promise of the post-apocalyptic restoration of its soil to Paradise compels us to let materiality speak of place. Kevin Hetherington’s materiality-focused study of place posits that

if we stop thinking about places just in terms of human subjectivity and the way it narrates identities such as the identities of spaces, then we no longer need to look at places as fixed by subjectivity. Place is the effect of similitude, a non-representation that is mobilized through the placing of things in complex relation to one another and the agency/power effects that are performed by those arrangements. (Hetherington 1997, 187)

For both Ibn Qulawayh and Hetherington, place is activated through objects and their ability to act in complex sets of representational arrangements.

Karbalā grounds: Transplacing Karbala

After the death of Imam Husain and seventy-two of his supporters on the banks of the Euphrates River at a place called Karbala in 680 ce: in the years, decades, and centuries that followed it became a powerful site of martyrdom and memory. In the final decades of the tenth century, a memorial structure to commemorate the Imam’s martyrdom, a mashhad (“place of martyrdom”) was formalized with a wooden cenotaph and galleries (Allen 2012, 10);^[10] between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the tomb was periodically renovated and expanded by Safavid and Qajar kings, becoming a rauẓah or shrine as well (Ruffle 2021, 152). Although Karbala was important for professing loyalty and devotion to the Imams and Ahl-e Bait in the early Islamic period, by the tenth century it was established as an important place of pilgrimage (ziyārah, lit. “visitation”).

In the South Asian context, “karbalās” are multivalent built spaces that collapse the distance Shiʿa experience between Karbala and the subcontinent. I distinguish between the historical site of battle and where Imam Husain is buried in Iraq, which I capitalize (Karbala), and the Indo-Shiʿi sites of materialized and emplaced cultural memory of Husain’s martyrdom and enshrinement (karbalā). As a particular type of emplaced form, karbalā grounds and cemeteries in South Asia reflect the development of “place [as] a special kind of object” in Shiʿi cultural memory (Tuan 1979, 12). According to Yi-Fu Tuan, place has a “concentration of value . . . it is an object in which one can dwell” (ibid., 12). Place has materiality, through which it becomes objectified. A cemetery in India or Pakistan becomes a karbalā when the blessed soil from the area around Imam Husain’s shrine-tomb in Iraq is distributed on its ground. In the case of cemeteries, a corpse no longer needs to be transported more than two thousand miles from Hyderabad, India to Karbala to be buried in proximity to the Imam, because karbalā is in India. As we shall see in the next section, a place becomes a karbalā ground also when material embodiments (taʿziya, discussed in the third case study) of Imam Husain are interred on ʿAshura in its ground.

For even the wealthiest Shiʿa, making the journey to Karbala and other major Shiʿi shrine cities in the Middle East (the ʿatabāt-e ʿaliyāt, the “exalted thresholds”) was an expensive and dangerous endeavor, undertaken by relatively few until the advent of air travel and organized pilgrimage services. Muhammad Quli (r. 1580–1612), the fifth of the Qutb Shahi sultans, together with his peshwā (chief minister) Mir Muhammad Muʾmin Astarabadi established their vision for a new imperial capital in 999–1000/1591 that was distinctly Shiʿa. The first buildings constructed in “the city of Ḥaidar” (an epithet of Imam ʿAli) were primarily religious, including the Bādshāhī ʿāshūrkhānah,^[11] the Jāmiʿ masjid, and most interestingly the Chārminār, which manifests its own form of spatially marking Hyderabad as Shiʿi territory.

During the reign of Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, Hyderabad was physically marked as Shiʿi territory by his peshwā and collaborator in building the imperial city, Mir Muʾmin Astarabadi. Mir Muʾmin was an Iranian (who comprised just one of the many ethnic groups known collectively as foreigners, gharībān, who made their way to the Deccan beginning in the fourteenth century to seek their fortunes in the courts of the Deccan sultanates) from Astarabad in Gilan province in northern Iran along the coast of the Caspian Sea (Fischel 2020, 129). Hailing from a sayyid family, Mir Muʾmin was educated by his uncle, Amir Fakhr al-Din Samakhi in the religious and rational sciences. Due to political instability and intrigue, Mir Muʾmin was exiled from the Safavid court where he had served as tutor. Mir Muʾmin made his way to the Deccan, where his erudition and piety were quickly recognized by Muhammad Quli, who appointed him to the post of peshwā, chief minister, responsible for all religious, judicial, educational, and political matters in the Qutb Shahi kingdom (Rizvi 1986, 304). The architectural program embarked on by Muhammad Quli and Mir Muʾmin clearly established Hyderabad as the city of ʿAli, yet it was with the chief minister that we see another transplacement of Karbala that further articulated this new expression of Indo-Shiʿism at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Before Hyderabad was established in 1591, a brahmin village called Chichlam lay along the banks of the Musi River. Sometime in the mid-1500s, a Sufi named Shah Chiragh made his way from Najaf, Iraq, where Imam ʿAli’s body is enshrined to the village of Chichlam, where a small tomb was built after the shaikh​’s death. To provide a place for the city’s residents to be buried free of cost, Mir Muʾmin purchased the land adjacent to and including Shah Chiragh’s tomb sometime after 1591 (ibid., 309). The Daʾira Mir Muʾmin (or Mīr kā Dāʾirā) is a vast necropolis and karbalā ground by virtue of the camel loads of sacred soil Mir Muʾmin had transplaced from Karbala to Hyderabad (Sherwani 1974, 318). As I have observed elsewhere, “No longer did an Indian Shiʿa need to have his body transported in a burial caravan across more than 2000 miles for [interment] in one of Karbala’s many cemeteries for the promise of the reward of Paradise (jannat, firdaws)” (Ruffle 2021, 292).

In Lucknow, the Nawabs of Awadh (r. 1722–1858) most likely drew inspiration for establishing karbalā burial grounds from the erstwhile Shiʿi Qutb Shahs. The Nawabs were sayyids who claimed descent from the seventh Imam, Musa al-Kazim. Their ancestors migrated from Nishapur in the Khorasan region of northeastern Iran, located approximately eighty-four miles away from Mashhad, where the eighth Imam, ʿAli ibn Musa al-Reza, lies buried. The Nawabs and their wives universally aspired to be buried in Karbala, although most were unable to fulfill their pious goal because of the difficulty and distance separating Lucknow and the Imam’s shrine-tomb in Iraq. To compensate for their inability to undertake visitation (ziyārah) to Imam Husain’s shrine-tomb and to be interred within its soil, the Nawabs and their family members contributed to extensive building projects and religious endowments (awqāf) at the Karbala shrine (Tandon 2008, 244). Perhaps following the model of the Daʾira Mir Muʾmin, soil was imported from Karbala and distributed in special grounds for the burial of corpses and taʿziyas on 10 Muḥarram (ʿAshura), releasing Imam Husain from his shrine-tomb replica until the following year.

Karbalā Talkatora: Refashioning Karbala in Lucknow

The karbalās commissioned by the Lucknow Nawabs were polyvalent built religious spaces. Not only were some of these cemeteries, by virtue of the Karbala soil dispersed within their grounds, proximal portals to Imam Husain’s shrine-tomb and the “ladder” to the rewards of Paradise, but such sites reveal the polycentricity of Karbala as an emplaced “object” around which memory and devotional practice is focused in Indo-Shiʿism (see Aoun Hasan Naqvi’s photo essay, 2025). The Nawabi karbalā seems to have been unique to Awadh according to Banmali Tandon, who has observed that,

The plan-form which karbalas acquired at least in Nawabi Oudh in the nineteenth century and which was based on a loose imitation of that of the original shrine in Karbala seems, however, to have been unique. . . . Nearly all karbalas of which we have information from Nawabi times were erected in Lucknow in the nineteenth century by the Nawabs and their nobility and, significantly, by many leading Nawabi princesses, and were sometimes independent compositions and sometimes adjuncts to other religious or domestic buildings. (Tandon 2008, 245)

After the 1857 Great Rebellion, most of Lucknow’s karbalā grounds were damaged by the British, others fell into disuse with shifts in patronage caused by the 1947 Partition, and even more were razed through encroachment on these spaces caused by urban development and pressures caused by labor migration into the city.

The focal point of the Lakhnavi karbalā ground is a replica of the tomb, rauẓah, especially of Husain or member of the Ahl-e Bait. Some rauẓahs express a strong degree of similitude (tashābuh) to the tomb they represent, while others take on a more improvisational tone, integrating local architectural styles and motifs. Such pastiche is not surprising considering most of the rauẓahs’ architects and builders were South Asian Shiʿa, and some were converts. Within the rauẓah, there are chambers that contain symbolic graves (cenotaphs) of Imam Husain and Imam ʿAli around which devotees can circumambulate and offer prayers. Traditionally, the chambers are kept in a state of twilight. Candles presented as votive offerings by devotees cut through the gloom. Candles have metaphoric resonance in Shiʿi devotional practice in which Imam ʿAli is known as the “Commander of the Bees” (amīr al-naḥl), and candles have traditionally been burned during Muḥarram processions to remember the martyrdom and suffering of Imam Husain and his supporters (Seyed-Gohrab 2012, 82, 83). In addition to the rauẓah, Nawabi karbalās include mosques, minarets, gateways, chambers for holding mourning assemblies (majlis-e ʿazā), and graves.

Located in the southwestern edge of Lucknow, Karbalā Talkatora is one of the city’s most important karbalās. Karbalā Talkatora is most approximate in its likeness (tashābuh) to Imam Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb in Iraq (see figure 1).

Figure 1.Karbalā Talkatora, Lucknow. Photo by Aoun Hasan Naqvi, 2022.

According to the architectural historian Banmali Tandon, Talkatora has a pair of minarets and two domes, “a cylindrical one with a conical top and a deflated saucer-shaped one” (2008, 247). The rauẓah was built around 1800 by Mir Khuda Bakhsh, a nāʾib (revenue minister) for Nawab Saʿadat ʿAli Khan (Hjortshoj 1977, 168). The Talkatora complex is entered through a large gateway and is surrounded by extensive walls. There is an imāmbāṛā with elaborate stuccowork on the ceiling, and within its compound are numerous graves (ibid., 169).

Walking further into the complex, the shrine is entered through two gates that have a chain to be grasped by devotees for the transfer of the Imam’s barakah (blessing, auspiciousness), and to announce one’s presence to Husain, lest he be startled by your presence. The rauẓah is a transplacement of Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb to Lucknow, and such acts of announcing oneself to a saintly figure align with South Asian modes of religious decorum. The rauẓah is “a rectangular structure, in the austere Iraqi style, topped with a single cylindrical dome fronted by two Iraqi minarets of the sort that look like little lighthouses” (ibid., 169–70). As with Sufi shrines, Imam Husain’s symbolic grave faces the doorway to greet his devotees. The interiors of the domes are extensively decorated with verses from the Qurʾan (see figure 2).

Figure 2.Qurʾanic calligraphy above the zarīḥ (latticework grille surrounding a cenotaph or tomb) in Karbalā Talkatora, Lucknow. Photo by Aoun Hasan Naqvi, 2022.

Katharine Bartsch and Elise Kamleh read spatial rituals such as recitation of the marsiyah together with Lucknow’s built space as highly effective vernacular methods to connect Indian Shiʿa to Karbala and Najaf. Lucknow’s karbalā grounds, religious architecture such as the imāmbāṛā, and its poems of mourning such as the marsiyah brought Karbala to Lucknow. Bartsch and Kamleh observe that such rituals and built spaces “which used metaphors and similes to transpose the sacred action in Karbala to the plains of Lucknow in familiar and comprehensible images, conflate Karbala with Lucknow. Metaphorically speaking, Lucknow is Karbala during Muharram” (2014, 290). If we use language such as metaphors and similes to understand the relationship between Karbala and the subcontinent, the immediacy of how South Asian Shiʿa experience Karbala as place is removed. Karbala is not experienced metaphorically by South Asian Shiʿa; rather, a place such as the Karbalā Talkatora with both karbalā grounds and a replica of Husain’s tomb (rauẓah) brings Karbala into immediate and permanent proximity.

Taʿziya: Body in place, emplacing presence

In his study of the transformation of Muḥarram rituals in Dezful, a small city located in southwest Iran, Reza Masoudi Nejad argues that “singular focus on the place of ritual obscures the necessity of how rituals spatially manifest” (2018, 156). For Masoudi, the spatial dimension of ritual performance explains or expresses the mythos underpinning the events of Karbala. Recurrent throughout this article is the tension presented by the tendency of paradigms to impose binaries: space or place, religion or culture. Yet, in our case studies I see possibilities for both, as evidenced in Indo-Shiʿi practices of materially and somatically emplacing Karbala in the subcontinent. An analogous form to the karbalā ground and the rauẓah is the taʿziya, a type of Shiʿi built space that is also distinctly South Asian, collapsing the distance between the subcontinent and Karbala. The taʿziya explicitly replicates place in its built form as a likeness, shabīh, of Imam Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb. As such, the taʿziya is a place-making image-object that manipulates place and the presence of the Imam through the physical structure of the replica.

As a type of place-making image-object, the taʿziya is transtemporal, moving the devotee across time from the moment of Husain’s martyrdom in 680, while also relocating place, rupturing the distance between Karbala and the subcontinent. As I argue elsewhere, “South Asian Shiʿi religious architecture is inherently translocative (Tweed 2011, 24), bringing the shrine-tombs of ʿAli in Najaf and Husain in Karbala to the subcontinent; it is also transportational, through the rituals performed in its spaces, collapsing time and space for devotees between the Karbala event and the present” (2021, 164). Indo-Shiʿi material practices associated with constructing and taking out in procession taʿziyas are both place-making and visual. The translocative no longer fully captures the meaning of “place-memory” in Indo-Shiʿi cultural memory, particularly for place-making rituals such as the display and procession of taʿziya and emplaced funerary architecture and burial grounds that make Karbala immediate.

The taʿziya’s ephemeral qualities have received considerable scholarly attention (Chelkowski 1985, 2006; Dandekar 2022; Lyons 2015, 2022; A. H. Naqvi 2020c, 2020b, 2020a; Sohoni 2022). Holly Shaffer has described the taʿziya as an “architecture of ephemerality” that “emerged from the devout who looked west to Iran and Iraq, and back to the seventh century, while they participated in the ritual, material, visual, and sensory practices in Awadh to enable Shiʿi religious devotion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (2017, 2). Shakeel Hossain interprets the ephemerality of the taʿziya through the idiom of ʿAlid devotion, which developed out of the shrine-based practices of South Asian Sufi dargāhs, motifs of Mughal funerary architecture, and Indic material religion (1990, 12). In this analysis, taʿziya is recognized as emergent within a tradition of devotion to the Imams and Ahl-e Bait, situated with a spatial framework, and shaped by South Asian or Indic material and religious practices. Hossain observes,

Taʿzia rituals, with their transient character have parallels in Hindu culture which is full of ceremonies where ephemeral Gods and Goddesses, and sometimes symbolic temples, are carried around the community and then immersed in the river. In India, the Shiʿite tradition and rituals—which evolved from the concept of religious worship focused on the divine forces of Ali and his descendants—closely reflected that of Hindu religious concept of devotion. (Hossain 1990, 12)

Bridging the place-memory dimension of the taʿziya, which enacts proximity between Indo-Shiʿi devotees inhabiting the present and the site of Imam Husain’s martyrdom and entombment on the desert plain of Karbala, Iraq, is the image-object’s anthropomorphic qualities. A taʿziya is an embodiment of Husain during the days of Muḥarram leading up to ʿAshura (Hjortshoj 1977, 141), manifesting the Imam’s presence (Ruffle 2021, 198). Deploying the idiom of love (maḥabbah) for the Imams and Ahl-e Bait (ḥubb-e Ahl-e Bait), the famed Lakhnavi Shiʿi theologian Sayyid ʿAli Naqi Naqvi, popularly known as “Naqqan Sahib,” draws the listener to imagine the taʿziya as an anthropomorphized and emplaced representation of Imam Husain:

It is an undeniable phenomenon that love always flows in the direction of its object; and if the object, for one reason or the other, happens to be beyond its reach, it contends itself even with an Image of the object it cherishes. Thus, when the devotee of God, His Prophet, and his progeny, find themselves unable to go to the shrine of the latter, their urge for expression of their inner longing makes them resort to substitute forms of satisfaction. (ʿAli Naqi Naqvi 1974, 133; quoted in Ruffle 2021, 198)

How then, do Shiʿa satisfy this longing to achieve the presence of the absent Imams and Ahl-e Bait? It is instructive to recall Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, which is “based on material contact between a remembering mind and a reminding object” (2015, 332). Moreover, a taʿziya takes the form of a mobile axis mundi by which Karbala is brought to South Asian Shiʿas in (multiply) replicated form, and by which to connect with the primordial site of God’s creation of the Shiʿi reality embodied in Imam Husain’s martyrdom.

Imam Husain’s proximity and presence is manifested in the taʿziya through its stylized “aniconic anthropomorphism.” While a taʿziya is fundamentally aniconic in form, it is also anthropomorphic because these image-objects are described in Urdu using anatomical vocabulary such as legs, head, and feet. Despite its ostensible aniconicity, the taʿziya is conceptualized in anthropomorphized form: its dome (gombad) or cupola (qubbah) takes the form of the head, and the structure rests on feet or legs (pāda) when taken out in procession (julūs) on ʿAshura, as we see in figure 3. The taʿziya’s aniconic anthropomorphism stimulates interactions with devotees in a relationship of one person to another.

Figure 3.Taʿziya, Muḥarram procession in Karachi. Photo by Mohammad Nabeel Jafri, 2019.

The humanistic elements of the taʿziya are amplified when it is damaged during a procession: “A permanent taʿziya damaged beyond repair in a Muharram procession is anthropomorphized by the title, shahīd (martyr), and through the ritual burial it is given in a cemetery” (Lyons 2015, 223; quoted in Ruffle 2021, 200). A taʿziya whose damages can be fixed is known as a “partial” shahīd (martyr), and it is usually retired from future processions. While the taʿziya is a focal object of loving devotion for Shiʿa (Ruffle 2020a, 280), “because the object is in some sense personified as a victim of the Karbala debacle, a taʿziya’s dome representing its head) is the particular target of ill-wishers” (Lyons 2015, 223; quoted in Ruffle 2020a, 280).

Tryna Lyon’s fieldwork in Multan, Pakistan reveals the ambivalent nature of the taʿziya as an anthropomorphized object of emplacement that draws the gaze, both loving and violent. Gazing on the built form of Husain’s ambulant shrine-tomb enacts a form of emplaced presence for devotees that activates the transfer and reception of barakah, for acts of intercessory aid and healing to occur, and for the miraculous erasure of time and distance. As an aniconic anthropomorphic built form, the taʿziya collapses the distance between not only Karbala as place and the subcontinent as a temporary embodiment of Husain during the ʿashra-e Muḥarram (the first ten days of Muḥarram); the taʿziya likewise makes the Imam immediate and real in material forms that have been shaped by Indo-Shiʿi material and religious practices.

Conclusion: Mapping Karbala-scapes

In this article I have undertaken to show the theoretical limitations of the Islamic/ate and the Persianate, two paradigms that have influenced two major fields of study, the Islamic/ate in the academic study of Islam and the Persianate in Iranian and South Asian studies. By centering material practice, ritual, and built space, Karbala emerges as a concentration of value in which Shiʿi cultural memory comes to indwell. In this article, I have tried to show the interconnection of materiality and place in shaping Indo-Shiʿi cultural memory.

The Persianate and the Islamic/ate are insufficient as universalizing categories to account for the diversity of Muslim religious subjectivities, the refusal to separate religion and culture, or to account for material expressions of linguistic identities. In this article, I have introduced a series of entangled concepts—place-making, material practice, built space, and Indo-Shiʿism—that constellate around a people-centered model that privileges context. It behooves us to ask how a model that focuses on place and materiality can be people centered. Places are relationally constituted by the objects placed within their space and the meanings ascribed by different actors. Kevin Hetherington writes, “Imagine place as being like a ship. It is not something that stays in one location but moves within networks of agents, human and non-human” (1997, 185). I introduce Hetherington’s ship metaphor (who draws on Foucault) to think about the nonlinear movement of place and the multiple networks through which its meaning is created by both human and nonhuman entities. We can extend this metaphor to the context-specificity of Indo-Shiʿism and its Karbala place-making practices, which are intrinsically translocal. Translocality is established through “the trans-gression of boundaries between spaces of very different scale as well as through the (re-) creation of ‘local’ distinctions between those spaces” (Freitag and Von Oppen 2010, 6).

The translocal nature of Karbala as place in Indo-Shiʿism and as a universal around which Shiʿi cultural memory is galvanized (in similarly context-specific modes) and operates through processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. De-territorialization of Karbala occurs through its becoming no longer spatially bounded to the “facts” of its geographical site. Karbala becomes re-territorialized through its recreation in local contexts through material and built forms, as well as through ritual practice. Arjun Appadurai proposed the suffix “-scape” to conceptualize different globalized landscapes, including the religioscape (1996, 33). This suffix intends to reflect the contingency that, "These terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors (ibid., 33). In concluding this article, I propose that the sacred landscape and the agents that shape it in South Asia and beyond constitute a “karbala-scape” that is materially and experientially constituted by a collective memory of Imam Husain’s martyrdom on the desert plain at Karbala.