The Urban Ritual: Ritual and Counter-Ritual During Muḥarram in Mumbai

Dongri in the old city of Mumbai has been the locality of diverse Muslim communities and the heart of annual Muḥarram rituals since the nineteenth century. During the first days of Muḥarram, Dongri is transformed into a ritual arena to commemorate the martyrdom of Husain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. I was roaming around Dongri to grasp how the diverse local communities are changing the cityscape during the early days of Muḥarram. Black flags and banners as well as shāmiānahs (temporary installations) and sabīls (drink booths) announce the beginning of the mourning season of Muḥarram. This is the time when the presence of police forces in the old city intensifies, as social tensions are inflamed during Muḥarram. While I was walking along Muhammad Ali Road, at a gated junction of a side-road, a police officer asked me not to enter that alley. He did not explain why he stopped me; however, he obviously rightly assumed I am a Shiʿa due to my black clothing. I had a look into the alley and realized there was a very different mood, with red flags and banners hanging throughout the alley. These red banners were found in a few other alleys, marking the territory of the recently emerged Wahhabi community in the old city of Mumbai, whose identity evidently differs from not only the Shiʿa communities but also from other Sunni communities in Dongri. The Wahhabis of Dongri are mainly comprised of Indian Muslim migrant workers who have returned from the Gulf Cooperation Council region, whose members are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Wahhabis refuse to express devotion to any being other than God, and the commemoration of Husain’s martyrdom is considered an act beyond the bounds of Islam. Using red banners, the Wahhabi community marks and claims certain parts of Dongri as its own territory during Muḥarram, pushing Shiʿi rituals and processions out. It also claims an open public place on Jail Road at the edge of the community’s locality to hold evening religious assemblies during Muḥarram. This area on Jail Road is a busy junction during Muḥarram, and the Wahhabi community’s assembly is obviously aimed at challenging and interrupting the Shiʿi processions that pass through that junction. While the community aims to challenge the commemoration of the Karbala tragedy, I would argue that its “counter-ritual” is in fact a part of social negotiations during Muḥarram; this community employs Muḥarram to ritually negotiate its position within Mumbai’s heterogeneous urban society.

In this article “Mumbai Muḥarram” is considered an “urban ritual,” that is, not limited to the observance of ʿAshura, the day of Husain’s martyrdom. It is rather a social drama through which diverse social groups are involved in social negotiations to (re)constitute Mumbai’s dynamic urban society. The commemoration of ʿAshura is a Shiʿi ritual; however, Mumbai Muḥarram had been historically limited neither to Shiʿas nor to Muslim communities. It was the biggest intercommunity festival during the nineteenth century and played a vital role in shaping social interactions and defining religio-social identities. Mumbai Muḥarram has been the scene of intensive interactions and tensions between diverse social and religious groups of Shiʿas, Sunnis, and Hindus during the last two centuries. However, the engagement of the Wahhabi community and its initiation of a counter-ritual has added a new fold to the complex landscape of Mumbai Muḥarram—and calls for reformulating it as an urban ritual that constitutes both Muḥarram rituals and counter-rituals.

The core idea I present here is that Mumbai Muḥarram is not just a religious ritual to commemorate the Karbala tragedy; it is rather an institutional negotiation that plays a significant role in the dynamics of urban society and cosmopolitan processes in Mumbai. This city has evolved into a cosmopolitan city through local, regional, and international immigration during the last two centuries. However, this cosmopolitan process is not merely about the immigration of diverse people into the city; it is rather about the process of encountering diverse ethnic and religious groups who negotiate their social position within Mumbai’s ever-changing urban society.

This article first introduces the history of Muḥarram in Mumbai, explaining the overall historical structure of Muḥarram commemoration in this city. The second section articulates the idea of urban ritual, exploring how diverse socio-ethnic communities have engaged in social negotiations during Muḥarram throughout Mumbai’s history. In the third section, I discuss the recently emerged Wahhabi Muḥarram counter-ritual, arguing that Muḥarram is not merely about the remembrance of the Karbala tragedy; rather, it produces a social space that draws seeming outsiders into the intensive urban negotiations. In this process, the commemoration of ʿAshura is constantly reinvented; thus, Mumbai produces its own unique Muḥarram that I call “Mumbai Muḥarram,” a grand urban ritual that in recent years has come to include Muḥarram counter-rituals.

The idea of this article is an outcome of my research project that was based on conducting fieldwork in Mumbai over two years and a major archival study at the Indian Office Records in the British Library. There are other significant historical studies on Muḥarram in Mumbai such as that by Jim Masselos (1982); however, juxtaposing ethnographic fieldwork and archival studies captures a rather different and comprehensive picture of urban processes through which Mumbai Muḥarram has been continually reinvented during the last two centuries. Attention to the historical dynamics led to a fieldwork study that not only included the usual ethnographic practice and participatory observations but also aimed at collecting the oral history of those involved in Mumbai Muḥarram. The archival materials revealed forgotten details of historical backgrounds, without which I would not be able to grasp many aspects of Muḥarram during my fieldwork. Yet, it was participatory observation and collecting oral histories during my two years of fieldwork that directed my archival research and had an impact on my reading of archival colonial documents and reports. I may not directly address archival materials as such; however, these documentary sources reflect the general framework of discussion in this article.

On the tragedy of ʿAshura and the history of Mumbai Muḥarram

Shiʿas have developed numerous rituals throughout history to commemorate ʿAshura, from the mourning assembly (majlis) and the procession to diverse forms of local mimes and performances that serve to reenact and represent the battle of Karbala and its aftermath. These rituals mostly originated in their Arab environment in Iraq, were later highly enriched in Iran during the Safavid period (the sixteenth to eighteenth century), and were dispersed and diffused on the Indian subcontinent (see Nakash 1993; Hussain 2005). During the British colonial period, it was Indians who spread the commemoration as far as East Africa, the Caribbean islands of Trinidad, and to Fiji in the Pacific (see Korom 1994, 2003; Mishra 2008). Like any other sociocultural phenomena, Muḥarram rituals have not been practiced in the same way in different social geographies, but rather the commemoration has been infused with local cultures and various folklore traditions. More importantly, the social function of rituals has been redefined according to local social agendas. The Muḥarram rituals constituted their own unique elaborations, social meanings, and functions in India, which are strikingly different in comparison to their Middle Eastern counterparts. The commemoration of the Karbala tragedy is essentially a Shiʿi practice in the Middle East, where Muḥarram rituals highlight the Shiʿi-Sunni division. However, the Muḥarram commemoration has metamorphosed into an annual intercommunity event in India (Korom 1994, 57–58). In the context of Mumbai, Sunni communities, such as the Konkanis, used to dominate the annual event of Muḥarram, in which some Hindus were also involved (Masoudi Nejad 2015a, 91; and Masselos 1982, 50).

There is no historical study that comprehensively articulates the evolution of Muḥarram rituals into an intercommunity practice in India. Nadeem Hasnain argued that it was more liberal Sunni Hanafi Muslims who observed ʿAshura (1988, 48). Moreover, he specifically explains that some of the Hindu rulers of Gwalior and Jaipur patronized Muḥarram rituals to create harmony and social intimacy among their Muslim and Hindus subjects. Hasnain’s discussion of the commemoration of Muḥarram evokes a sense of it as a kind of “official festival” in the rural areas that aimed at social unity, establishing a legacy for authorities to uphold authority over their subjects. However, his explanation does not reflect the sociopolitical characteristics of Muḥarram in Mumbai and other Indian metropolises. As I shall explain, the historical accounts show that Muḥarram rituals were performed as a kind of “folk festival” in Mumbai’s cosmopolitan context. During the nineteenth century, the Muḥarram festival created a space for negotiation among diverse socio-ethnic communities, and for challenging British colonial authority.

During the nineteenth century, ʿAshura was predominantly solemnized by processions in Mumbai. While the mourning assemblies (majālis-e ʿazā) were held at Shiʿi religious places, these events had been barely noticed in historical records and narratives, since they had minimal public manifestations and were solely associated with Shiʿa communities, a minority within the Muslim minority. Muḥarram was all about processions that were transforming the city into a ritual arena, entirely changing the cityscape and urban life during Muḥarram. Mumbai Muḥarram included the processions of ṭolīs (street-bands) and the final procession on ʿAshura (Muḥarram 10th). The procession of ṭolīs usually ran between the 5th of Muḥarram and ʿAshura; each maḥalla (locality) had its own band ready to parade through the city, compete with, and even fight the band of rival maḥallas (for more details see Masoudi Nejad 2015a, 91–93). The most important Muḥarram event, however, was the final procession on ʿAshura, known as the “Taboot Procession.”^[1] Influenced by Hindu culture, this was a symbolic funeral cortège whose endpoint was the seafront, where taʿziyas (the replicas of Husain’s tomb) and taboots (coffins) were immersed in the sea. This procession was the greatest annual event in Mumbai, and the city was renowned for this procession. Sir George C. M. Birdwood (1915) describes the arriving of the Taboot Procession at the seafront in Mumbai as the most picturesque event of South Asia during the late nineteenth century. This scene is vividly captured in a fascinating gravure print by Emile Antoine Bayard (1837–91), published in the late nineteenth century (figure 1). This print shows the exciting moment of the procession’s arrival at the seafront. People carry taʿziyas and torches while playing drums and horns. This image shows the social and ethnic diversity among participants, who dress and act differently. Some participants are half-naked and have painted bodies as they masquerade as tigers in procession (See figure 1 & 2).

Majālis (mourning assemblies) are occasions when sadness and grief are clearly expressed; in processions, however, suffering is predominantly expressed through bodily performances, demonstrating a very different atmosphere in comparison with majālis. Bearing this in mind, Muḥarram processions in Mumbai were still not solely about expressing mourning, as would be expected. Many historical reports describe the participation of Hindus of lower orders who acted as man-tigers and fools (see figure 2); the processions involved drinking, dancing, and the beating of drums and tom-toms (Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce 1845, 64). Muḥarram was a time when Mumbai turned into a “carnival” scene. The following account well describes the atmosphere of the city during Muḥarram, a scene that is partly depicted by the two fascinating nineteenth-century prints in figures 1 and 2.

The streets in Native Town became gradually filled with a miscellaneous influx of human being of all kinds, and denominations. Brilliant cavalcades and corteges, bands of merry dancers, groups of counterfeit Ethiopians, knots of clowns—embellished with the conical cap and countless little bells, which tinkled at every step—saints, faqueers, dervishes, and itinerant preachers enacting absurd pantomimes, men painted to resemble the tiger, with long bushy tails, engaged in mime battles, fictitious riders, seated on imitation horses and camels, prancing and dancing around you, and ragamuffin mobs, under the especial eye of our picturesque Mounted Police—the whole a vast and animated masquerade, passed and repassed athwart the bewildered gaze of the spectator, and Innumerable illuminated shows and pageants completed his confusion. (Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce 1858, 6)

Figure 1.Muḥarram procession arriving at the shore of Back Bay. Wood engraving by Emile Bayard, 1878. Source: Personal collection of Reza Masoudi Nejad.

Figure 2.Human tigers performing in the Muḥarram festival. Street performers depicted in a wood engraving. Source: The Graphic, 1872 (in the public domain).

The Taboot Procession took place on ʿAshura on certain routes in the native town toward a seafront (for details see Masoudi Nejad 2015a, 94–96). However, as mentioned, from Muḥarram 5th to 10th, ṭolī processions took place throughout the city in the evenings. These processions were not limited to the native town; ṭolīs also paraded with their tābūts, ʿalams, and torches through the Fort, the European and administrative walled city located outside the native town. The processions were a way to expand the ritual territory, mocking the British colonial authority ensconced within the Fort. By the late 1860s, there was a significant drive to keep the processions out of the Fort. Eventually, in 1871, the first Muḥarram regulation was announced by the brigadier general commander of the city, which “banned [the] entering of taboots into the Fort” (Times of India 1871a, 3). This first Muḥarram regulation shows that dispersing and controlling processions was a form of spatial negotiation between the local communities and the colonial authority in Mumbai.

Figures 1 and 2, the aforementioned newspaper reports, and the Muḥarram regulation of 1871 are just a few of the large number of historical accounts showing that Mumbai Muḥarram was performed in a typical “serio-comical carnival scene,” as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 107–24). The serious-comical characteristics of Muḥarram add a rhetorical element into the commemoration that breaches everyday human affairs, suspending the laws, prohibitions, restrictions, and the order of everyday life that constitutes the hierarchical structure of power, which undergirds myriad social and political inequalities (see Bakhtin 1984, 107–8). Bakhtin’s idea reveals the rebellious nature of Mumbai Muḥarram, a typical liminal status that Victor Turner described as an anti-structure state, which provides a temporary opportunity for social and political negotiations. What makes Bakhtin’s idea particularly interesting is that he argued that the serious-comical dimension of carnival facilitates the transgressive process that brings together diverse ideas, values, thoughts, feelings, and things that are distanced or even contradicting one another in everyday worldviews. Muḥarram in Mumbai has always been a liminal time when everyday norms are suspended, an edgy urban status when contradictory ideas and feelings, such as joy-sadness, love-hate, and social solidarity and enmity, are excessively experienced. This extraordinary atmosphere unfolds through a process that Bakhtin called “familiarization,” through which “carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid” (Bakhtin 1984, 123). Herein, the religious suffering of devotees and the social liberation of drunk dancers have been simultaneously performed during Muḥarram. More importantly, the “familiarization” process destroys the boundary between past and present, thus the tragic distance of the past can be replicated, represented, and experienced during Muḥarram. Bakhtin’s idea well formulates the non-everyday rationale of Mumbai Muḥarram. However, something differs in Mumbai Muḥarram from the typical Bakhtinian carnival, which is the socioreligious diversity of its participants. It should not be assumed that the familiarization process entwined diverse ethnoreligious communities participating in Muḥarram rituals. The intercommunity commemoration of Muḥarram is not a melting pot in which all communities lose their own identity. Rather, all these communities negotiate and compete with one another during Muḥarram, and this has been a part of Mumbai’s cosmopolitan process and the main drive of Muḥarram dynamics in the city.

Mumbai Muḥarram: An urban ritual

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Mumbai emerged as “the cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean” (Green 2011, 3) that brought together linguistically and ethnically diverse Muslim groups to an unprecedented degree. The city of some thirty thousand inhabitants in the late eighteenth century turned into a city with a population of more than a million people in the late nineteenth century. The city hosted Muslims from all over the region, including “Arabs and Turks, Iranians and Turanis, Sindis and Hindis, Kabulis and Qandaharis, Punjabis and Lahoris, Kashmiris and Multanis, Madrasis and Malabaris, Gujaratis and Dakanis, Baghdadis and Basrawis, Muscatis and Konkanis. These Muslims, however, did not collapse themselves into an indistinguishable and uniform religious community” (ibid., 4). Although colonial sources may ignore socio-ethnic diversity, there was an awareness about the heterogeneous social context of Mumbai. For example, Rafiuddin Ahmed, in his appeal against Muḥarram regulations, wrote in the Times of India in 1908, arguing:

The most essential fact to be learnt about the Mahomedan community of Bombay is that there is no such community. There are various communities in this city which profess the Mahomedan religion and which may broadly be classified under the two great sects of Islam, Sunni and Shiʿa. The Shiʿas, who are in a minority, are themselves sub-divided into no less than five sections, viz, Borahs, Khojas, the Moghals, the Hindustani Asna Asharis, and the Sulamnis. All these differ from each other not only in minor dogmas but also in language, dress, and other essentials of a common nationality. . . . The Sunni again, though they do not differ much in dogma, are roughly divided into four sections, namely, the Memons, the Konkanis, the Deccanis, and the miscellaneous Mahomedans of Upper India. (Ahmed 1908, 7)

Elsewhere, I have described the Shiʿas of Mumbai as a “fractal community” (Masoudi Nejad 2012). The idea of fractal community refers to the fact that the Shiʿas may be considered an integrated socioreligious community. However, as Rafiuddin Ahmed also argued, there has been no single Shiʿa community; rather, this fractal community has been constituted based on diverse communities that have their own separate identities.^[2] Mumbai’s Shiʿa communities include ethnic groups such as the Khojas, the Bohras, the Iranians (known as Moghals/Moguls), Hindustani Shiʿas, and the Baluchis. The full picture of the diversity among Shiʿas can be understood only by considering that these Shiʿas belong to at least three different subgroups. For example, the Khojas divided into Ithna ʿAshari and Nizari Ismaʿili groups; and the Bohras are Ismaʿili but should not be confused with the followers of the Aga Khan, as they follow the school of Mustaʿali Ismaʿilis. In other words, socio-ethnic diversity is multiplied by religious diversity, producing a social landscape that is often incomprehensible to outsiders.

These socio-ethnically and religiously diverse Muslim groups had hardly been in contact with one another elsewhere. The social encounter in Mumbai made it necessary for all these communities to redefine and reinvent their identities against other Shiʿi and Sunni communities. In this process, Muḥarram rituals, as the most important annual event in Mumbai, played a significant role. During the nineteenth century, Muḥarram was the time for intensive social negotiations among the ever-increasing number of social segments of this cosmopolitan city. Muḥarram was the time when each community tried to practice and manifest its own rituals and dominate the stage of this social drama. Therefore, Muḥarram was always the scene of social tensions and violence, a liminal time of social negotiations when a degree of social violence was justified (e.g., see van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969).

In the 1830s, the Iranians performed their “Horse Procession” to represent the aftermath of ʿAshura tragedy. The Sunni community of Konkanis who, at the time, led the Muḥarram commemoration campaigned and lodged a court case against the Iranian initiative, as they found it objectionable and even repugnant (Masselos 1982, 51–52). Later, tension increased between the Iranians and the Konkanis, eventually causing the British colonial authority to ban the Iranian Horse Procession (Masoudi Nejad 2017, 89–90). We also have historical accounts that show, due to social rivalries and tensions, that sometimes the Khojas were not allowed to carry their taboot beyond their private grounds (Times of India 1871b, 3). Later, when the Sunni community of Memons came to dominate the Muḥarram rituals, the Times of India published numerous reports in March 1872 about a conflict that was sparked between the Memon and Shiʿi communities of Iranians and Bohras in the Bhendi Bazaar area. One report mentions that the Bohras were a peaceful and “lily-livered” race who would remain at home after receiving a few beatings, but that the Moguls (Iranians) were ready to fight (Times of India 1872, 2). Throughout the past two centuries of social negotiations, the social groups at the heart of Mumbai Muḥarram have constantly changed: first, it was the Konkanis who predominantly controlled the Muḥarram rituals, then the Memons, and later the Iranians; nowadays it is the Hindustani Shiʿas, primarily from Uttar Pradesh (UP), who hold the central role in leading these rituals. As I shall explain later, throughout the process of social negotiations, the Muḥarram commemoration has metamorphosed from an intercommunity festival into a predominantly Shiʿi ritual in Mumbai.

Mumbai cannot be conceived without rituals, festivals, and processions. This is not solely because of excitement and social freedom during the time of rituals that make this tough city bearable and even lovable; rather, rituals provide a space for intensive negotiations to shape and reshape the sociopolitical relationships among super-diverse communities in Mumbai. Therefore, capturing the social reality in this city depends on an understanding of social interactions during rituals and festivals. In this context, rituals such as Muḥarram and the Ganapati festival^[3] are religious performance as much as social practice, and actively define and redefine community identities. Although the religious and social aspects of rituals are entangled and indistinguishable, the religious idea of these rituals is often pushed into the background and social agendas are pulled to the forefront of these rituals. Therefore, this article argues that the Muḥarram commemoration is not reducible to mere religious Shiʿi agendas, as it produces an institutional negotiation system that plays a significant role in the dynamics of urban society and the cosmopolitan process.

This argument implies a shift from focusing on everyday life to non-everyday practices to understanding urban dynamics. Henri Lefebvre and other Marxist scholars (see Lefebvre 2002; Bayat 2010), who have made great contributions to urban studies, have mainly focused on the dynamics of class struggle and how everyday life is a part of social and political negotiations. However, they have neglected non-everyday practices such as rituals and festivals that are not driven by class struggles, but rather by “community struggle” (see Masoudi 2018, 156–61). My argument is that the city is not merely the production of everyday interactions; it is rather produced through layers of social interactions, including during rituals when community struggles, not class struggles, drive intensive social negotiations. Therefore, my approach addresses another paradigm shift, from that of social class to social group (community). Here social group is defined based on socio-ethnic and religious identity: for example, the idea that the Bohra community in Mumbai is defined based on socio-ethnic identity, and the fact that its members are Mustaʿali Ismaʿili, a Shiʿi denomination that is almost exclusively followed by this Gujarati trading community. As discussed, a social group or community is not defined on its own but rather by its position relative to other groups it encounters (Bourdieu 1985, 724). Therefore, the landscape of urban negotiations and the identity of communities evolves whenever a new fold is added into or removed from the sociopolitical fabric of the city.

From ritual to counter-ritual

There were two important turning points in the history of Mumbai Muḥarram. The first one was when the colonial authorities imposed a regulation excluding Hindus from Muḥarram rituals, allegedly as a reaction to the 1893 Hindu-Muslim violence during Muḥarram. This event had partly contributed to invention of the modern Ganapati festival by Bal Gangadhar Tilak in the late nineteenth century (see Masoudi Nejad 2014, 272–74; Edwardes 1923, 104). The second and probably more important turning point was when the 1912 police regulation was announced. Although this regulation did not ban the Muḥarram processions, its conditions for issuing Muḥarram licenses were such that people refused to comply and did not take their taboots out in procession. For all practical purposes, the 1912 regulation effectively ended the ṭolī and the taboot processions for good in the old city of Mumbai. Consequently, historical police reports published in the Times of India indicate that the commemoration was limited to the religious assemblies (majālis) held at Shiʿi religious places, such as Shushtari and Namazi Imambara (for more details see Masoudi Nejad 2015b, 336–37; 2016, 94–95). For a couple of decades, there were no processions during Muḥarram in the old city of Mumbai. However, the Shiʿi communities initiated a procession in Bandra, one of Mumbai’s emergent suburbs, that was administratively not under the governor of Mumbai (see Masoudi Nejad 2015b). There are historical accounts that report another post-1912 phenomenon in the old city, the erection of shāmiānahs and maṇḍaps (temporary stages) by Sunni communities in public spaces to hold public lectures during Muḥarram to observe the tragedy of Karbala (Times of India 1938, 10). These public assemblies were free from any emotional performance that had been previously practiced.

Since the 1940s, the Muḥarram procession was revived in public spaces in the old city of Mumbai by the Iranian Shiʿa community, known locally as the Moghals. While many influential Iranian families migrated from Mumbai after Independence in 1947, there was a wave of immigration to Mumbai from UP, Lucknow, and Bihar. Moreover, the abolition of zamīndārī (landlordism) in India in the late 1950s also contributed to increasing the population of Shiʿa communities, as many nawābs (aristocrats) and zamīndārs (landlords) from Lucknow immigrated to Mumbai. When the population of the Shiʿi communities increased in Mumbai, they gained sociopolitical confidence and more Muḥarram processions were gradually established, the most important of which was on ʿAshura. The revived ʿAshura procession, however, was not toward the seafront like the earlier taboot procession. The ʿAshura procession instead went from Dongri toward the Iranian Cemetery in Mazgan (Masoudi Nejad 2017, 95–98). As previously discussed, the Muḥarram processions were an intercommunity practice during the nineteenth century; however, the revived Muḥarram processions in Mumbai are solely performed by Shiʿi communities. Today, in contrast with many other Indian cities, Muḥarram processions in Mumbai are solely Shiʿi rituals, and the Sunni communities do not participate in these processions.^[4]

Muḥarram is commemorated in many areas across the metropolis of Mumbai, from Bandra and Govandi to Mumbra; however, Dongri is considered the heart of the Muḥarram rituals. The public spaces across Dongri are mainly claimed by Shiʿa communities for their Muḥarram rituals. Using flags, banners, sabīls, and other temporary installations, the Shiʿi communities transform the cityscape into a Muḥarram ritual arena. In Dongri area, one will also find a few shāmiānahs, where the Sunni communities hold public assemblies to commemorate the martyrdom of Husain. This ritual landscape has transformed over the last few decades due to a Wahhabi community that has gradually settled in Dongri; this community has added a new fold to the Muḥarram landscape there by initiating its own public assembly and engaging in “urban negotiations” during the ritual period. While the community has been around at least since the early 1990s, the Wahhabi’s Muḥarram event has become more noticeable since the 2000s in Dongri.^[5] What particularly differs in this new ritual initiative from other public events is that one of its agendas is to challenge the commemoration of the Karbala tragedy.

The heart of this community is Umar Farooq Mosque in Jail Road, only two hundred meters away from the Iranian Mosque, better known as Moghal Masjid, which is one of oldest Shiʿi religious institutions in Mumbai. Umar Farooq Mosque is in an area dominated by Shiʿi religious sites around which the Muḥarram processions and rituals are organized (see map 1). The Wahhabi community has appeared as a new social group, composed of Indian Sunni migrant workers who have returned from Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia. Although Salafi and Wahhabi teachings have a long background in India, the Wahhabi community is a new socioreligious segment in the old city of Mumbai that manifests itself as a kind of maḥalla, a social group that is socially and spatially bound together. Therefore, here we are not referring to a religious movement or mission but rather a new local community that needs to negotiate its social position in the old city of Mumbai.

Map 1.Umar Farooq Mosque and the major Shiʿi religious institutions in the old city of Mumbai. Map created by Reza Masoudi Nejad.

1. Omar Farooq Mosque; 2. Iranian Mosque (Moghal Masjid); 3. Shushrai Imambara; 4. Amin Imambara; 5. Anjuman-e Fotowat-e Isna Ashari Yazdian (also known as Darbar-e Husaini); 6. Imamiyeh Mosque; 7. Namazi Imambara (also known as Zeynabiyeh); 8. Saifee Mosque; 9. Rowda al-Tahereh; 10. Khoja Mosque; and 11. Qaisar Bagh.

The Wahhabi community may dispute being identified as “Wahhabi,” as it is considered a way of discrediting the teachings of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), who called for Muslims to follow Islamic law and limit themselves to the fundamentals of the Qurʾan and ḥadīth. The followers of his teachings prefer to identify themselves as ahl al-tawḥīd or al-muwaḥḥidūn, which literally means those who follow monotheism and profess God’s unity (see Algar 2002; Commins 2005). British colonial writers such as Sir William Wilson Hunter (1871) and contemporary British scholars like Charles Allen (2005) have used Wahhabism to address the Muslim revival movements, including the nineteenth-century Ahl al-Hadith movement. These British scholars, however, are accused of loosely using Wahhabism and exaggerating the influence of ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s teachings on the South Asian movements to defame those movements that called for jiḥād against British colonialism (see Commins 2005, 143–45). Nonetheless, the Indian movements and the followers of ʿAbd al-Wahhab shared salafī ideas that Sufis and Shiʿa Muslims are not true believers, thus labeling them kufār (see Metcalf 1982, 277–78, 291–92). In fact, what makes Salafi and Wahhabi teachings controversial among Muslim communities is not their unjustified promotion of jiḥād, but rather their narrow definition of Islam and lack of tolerance to accept other denominations of Islam. From the Wahhabi and Salafi ideological point of view, any act or statement that indicates devotion to a being other than God is considered idolatry (shirk). This approach considers popular religious practices such as Sufi rituals, visiting Sufi shrines, or solemnizing the martyrdom of Husain as impermissible acts that place Sufi saints and the Imams in between Muslims and God. Therefore, adherents of this teaching strive to eliminate such religious practices. To contextualize the social oddness of this Salafi agenda in India, it is enough to note that the Sufi shrines in India, such as Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai, have been commonly respected and visited by Muslim and Hindu communities. Moreover, as already discussed, Muḥarram had been commemorated not only by Sunni communities but also many Hindus in Mumbai.

While Salafi teachings may have a long historical background in India, during recent decades followers of the movement grew in India for two reasons. First is the rise of anticolonial religious revival movements in South Asia, such as the Tablighi Jamaʿat, a transnational missionary movement, which promotes Salafi teachings. These movements have been supported by the World Muslim League, a Saudi organization that promotes Wahhabi teachings and is aimed at challenging Sufism and eliminating popular religious practices (see Ahmad 1991; Commins 2005, 152). There is no doubt that the hostile environment in India for Muslim communities has also contributed to the success of these movements in promoting Salafi teachings among Sunni communities in India. Second, the increase in the number of Indian Muslim workers returning from the Arab countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), specifically Saudi Arabia, has had a significant role in the emergence of the Wahhabi community in Mumbai. Here, I highlight the agency of returnee Indian Muslim workers who constitute a local community in the old city of Mumbai, since my focus is not on the religious movements that their critics claim are sponsored by other countries. While the emergence of such a local community differs from that of religious movements, the two are interrelated.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other members of GCC initially relied on an Arab workforce coming from Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine; however, since the 1970s, many other countries, including India and Pakistan, became the source of the workforce for the Kingdom’s ambitious infrastructure projects (Holden 1981, 407–9). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has sponsored the majority of this foreign labor force in the GCC region. The number of Indians who traveled to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has considerably increased in recent decades. While only thirty-four thousand Indians were working in the Kingdom in the mid-1970s, this number reached over 1.2 million in the late 1990s (Kapiszewski 2001, 64). Andrzej Kapiszewski reports that the GCC region had about 3 million Indian workers in 1997; in a more recent study, Sameena Hameed reports that in 2018 the Arab countries of the GCC sponsored 8.5 million Indian expatriates, and that the vast majority of them were unskilled and semi-skilled workers (Hameed 2021, 442).

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new ideas, cultures, and religious teachings came to Mumbai along with the waves of immigrants who came from other parts of the subcontinent, Indian Ocean, and Iranian Plateau. The immigration of Parsees, Konkanis, Marwaris, Bohras, Khojas, and Iranians, among others, brought new ethnoreligious dimensions to the social fabric of Mumbai. During recent decades, however, it has been the returnee Indian Muslim workers who not only brought new ideas and religious teachings but also added a new fold on the already heterogeneous social landscape of Mumbai. As mentioned, a so-called Wahhabi community has gradually clustered in Dongri and engaged with Muḥarram in a very different way compared with what has been experienced in Mumbai in the past. Members of this community very evidently distinguish themselves from the other Sunni communities in Dongri area by the iconography of their banners, shāmiānah, and the stage that they temporarily set up during Muharram. In contrast to other local Sunni communities, they aim to challenge the commemoration of the Karbala tragedy; therefore, the local Shiʿi communities simply call them “Wahhabi,” distinguishing them from the other local Sunni communities. The Wahhabi community in Dongri holds a public assembly during Muḥarram at a spot on Jail Road that turns into a busy junction during Muḥarram (see figure 3). This situation could obviously provoke disputes and tensions between the Wahhabi and local Shiʿi communities. Some minor physical clashes happened during the 2000s; however, during my fieldwork in 2009 and 2010, no physical violence occurred. As far as I have been informed, since then no serious issues have occurred, as the police have well managed the situation.^[6]

I shall add that labels such as “the Moghals” or “the Wahhabis” are coined in the social context of Mumbai, where the locals are constantly inventing labels to distinguish emerging communities that they encounter. While the Iranian Twelver Shiʿas would not call themselves “Moghal,” such a label was invented in Mumbai to distinguish them from other Iranian communities, known as the Iranis and Parsees, which are both Zoroastrian (see Masoudi Nejad 2017, 74–75, 82). Similarly, the local Shiʿi communities call the recently emerged community “Wahhabi” to distinguish it from other local Sunni communities.

Figure 3.The evening public assembly of the Wahhabi community at Jail Road. The police force a narrow path open, as this is very busy area during Muḥarram. Mumbai, December 2010. Photo by Reza Masoudi Nejad.

Through the history of Mumbai, especially during the colonial era, there have always been some social or political elites who were unhappy with Muḥarram, arguing that its rituals interrupt their tranquility and everyday life in the city. These elites had no socioreligious connection to the Muḥarram commemoration and often expressed their opinion by writing in newspapers, asking the authorities to control and regulate the rituals. What makes the Wahhabis’ recent engagement particularly interesting is that they have initiated a ritual that aims to challenge the legitimacy Muḥarram rituals; therefore, I call it a counter-ritual. They strongly believe that Shiʿi rituals are the manifestation of idolatry, and preventing such public performances is a religious necessity. Considering that there had been no early Islamic ritual on ʿAshura, the Wahhabis’ initiative is not based on an Islamic tradition, as they may argue. The Wahhabi and Salafi teachings are basically against “innovations” in religious creed and ritual, as it is considered as a foundation of heresy. Yet, this community has invented a counter-ritual to seemingly conduct its religious duty to challenge Shiʿi rituals. Allegedly, the local leaders of this community have publicly stated that they want to stop Shiʿi rituals in public spaces, as according to their teaching’s point of view, spectating Shiʿi rituals is considered a great sin—one that even breaks one’s marriage.^[7]

Obviously, the recently emerged Wahhabi community is not in a sociopolitical position to stop and ban Shiʿi rituals as it might ultimately hope. Nevertheless, the counter-ritual serves this community in different ways; it not only enhances social solidarity among the Wahhabi community but also gives it a platform to negotiate with other established local communities and the city authorities. This negotiation is seemingly about having the right to the city and gaining permission to hold assemblies in urban spaces. Furthermore, it enables this community to announce, practice, and establish its sociopolitical position as an active, new social group in the city. Although the community may not be able to stop Shiʿi rituals, the counter-ritual helps it to become an active agent in Mumbai’s cosmopolitan process. This community is an economically disadvantaged social group that might not have a strong sociopolitical position in everyday circumstances; however, Muḥarram grants members temporary power to negotiate their position, since Muḥarram is a liminal or antistructural time, when the everyday structure of power is suspended and a disadvantaged social group might be empowered.

As mentioned, the Sunni communities set up a few stages in the Dongri area to commemorate Husain’s martyrdom. The Wahhabi community distinguishes its stage and shāmiānah by its red color, differentiating its identity and intention from other Sunni communities. The content of some banners indicates that the community tries to invent a new definition for its public events during Muḥarram. For example, one of largest banners next to the stage reads “Muharram al-Harram, Happy New Year” in English and Urdu. It is worth mentioning that the month of Muḥarram is the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, but there is no Islamic tradition to celebrate the New Year.^[8] Moreover, ʿAshura, the tenth day of Muḥarram, does not obviously mark the New Year.

Wahhabi and Salafi teachings refuse celebrating or commemorating the birthday or the death of people, including the Prophet Muhammad (Metcalf 1982, 150); thus, as mentioned, community members want to mock Shiʿi rituals that honor the Karbala martyrs, and one of their approaches is to display provocative statements. For example, some of the red flags and banners by which they demarcate their community territory in Dongri honor the ʿUmayyad caliphs with the title of Amīr al-Muʾminīn, “Commander of the Faithful,” an epithet associated with the Rashidun Caliphs beginning with ʿUmar ibn Khattab (r. 634–644). Interestingly, in Shiʿi iconography the color red signifies Imam Husain’s killers, that is, the ʿUmayyad troops, and it is difficult to imagine that the leaders of the local Wahhabi community are not aware of this iconography. Some local Shiʿa find honoring Muʿawiyyah (r. 661–680) and Yazid (r. 680–683) by the title of Amīr al-Muʾminīn not only provocative and controversial but also an act of bidʿah (invention). Sunni communities honor the Rashidun Caliphs with this title; however, paying equal respect to Muʿawiyyah and Yazid, two controversial figures in the history of Islam, is unusual. Muʿawiyyah, the governor of Syria, revolted against ʿAli, the fourth caliph, to claim authority over Muslim society and establish the ʿUmayyad dynasty. Muʿawiyyah was a member of the aristocratic family of Mecca who had refused the prophecy of Muhammad until nearly everyone else in Mecca had converted to Islam. As S. Husain M. Jafri (1979) explains, the transition of power from Muʿawiyyah to his son, Yazid, was controversial as it was against the treaties Muʿawiyyah entered with his political rivals. The dispute over the authority of Yazid led to the tragedy of Karbala, when the grandson of Prophet was brutally killed and his family members were humiliated under the Yazid’s rule. Therefore, honoring Muʿawiyyah and Yazid with the title of Amīr al-Muʾminīn is considered a provocation by Shiʿi communities.

There are other historical precedents that a community invented rituals to protest the Shiʿi commemoration of ʿAshura. What makes the Wahhabis’ counter-ritual interesting and unique is that they employ Muḥarram itself as the opportunity to protest Muḥarram rituals. The very first protest against Shiʿi commemoration of ʿAshura happened when the Buyids (934–1062) initiated and invented the very first Shiʿi procession on ʿAshura in Baghdad in the tenth century (see Masoudi 2018, 37–38). In al-Bidāyah w’al-nihāyah (The Beginning and the End), Ibn Kathir reported that in about the year 973, Baghdad’s Sunni community responded to the Shiʿi procession with a carnival, addressing the battle of Camel^[9] and discrediting ʿAli, the first Shiʿi Imam and the father of Husain (see Masoudi 2018, 39; Mazzaoui 1979, 232). Ibn Kathir wrote, “A group of Sunnis placed a woman on a camel and called her ʿAishah and someone took the name Talhah, and someone took the name Zubayr, and they said: We are going out to fight the followers of ʿAli. Many people on both sides were killed” (Ibn Kathir 1990, 11:253; quoted in Hussain 2005, 84).

What makes the Wahhabi counter-ritual particularly interesting is that it is defined and practiced on the existing Mumbai Muḥarram platform. Therefore, it should be seen as a part of Mumbai Muḥarram. Instead of initiating a new public ritual in the city, an enterprise that would need major sociopolitical capital, seemingly beyond the Wahhabi community’s resources, the community employs Muḥarram to practice its religious teachings and negotiate its social position in the city. As discussed, the Wahhabi community, like other ethnoreligious communities throughout the history of Mumbai, developed and invented its own Muḥarram ritual to define its identity and establish its position in the cosmopolitan context of Mumbai. Nonetheless it seems that the invention is still a work in progress. The development of the Wahhabis’ counter-ritual in Mumbai makes it apparent again that Mumbai Muḥarram is not merely a religious ritual, nor a Shiʿi event. Mumbai Muḥarram is rather an urban ritual through which contradictory religious agendas are practiced, all of which are entwined within the framework of urban negotiations that drive cosmopolitan processes.

Conclusion

The discussions articulated in this article describe “Mumbai Muḥarram” as an urban ritual that produces social space in which diverse performances are staged, many of which do not reflect the religious agendas of Muḥarram rituals. Mumbai Muḥarram appears as a grand urban ritual in which Shiʿi rituals and counter-rituals are simultaneously performed, manifesting a complex social drama in which urban negotiations take place. The commemoration of Muḥarram was an intercommunity event during the nineteenth century, when rituals were not limited to expressing grief over the tragedy of Karbala; it was rather performed in a typical Bakhtinian “serio-comical carnival scene,” creating a liminal status in the city and suspending the everyday norms and rules. The biggest festival of the city was a folk festival that no single authority defined or regulated. Thus, every community solemnized Muḥarram in its own way. Mumbai Muḥarram was an urban stage on which diverse communities performed their own rituals and identity, negotiating and reinventing themselves in Mumbai’s cosmopolitan landscape. As the result of and throughout the process of social negotiations, Mumbai Muḥarram has constantly changed, transforming Muḥarram rituals from an intercommunity event into Shiʿi practice. In recent years, however, Mumbai Muḥarram has undergone a most unexpected development as it provides a space for manifestation of the Wahhabi community’s counter-ritual. This reveals a ritual scene that is surely beyond the idea of Muḥarram ritual as a Shiʿi religious practice and even Bakhtin’s idea of carnival. The history and dynamics of Mumbai Muḥarram well illustrate the complex interactions and struggles among diverse communities in this cosmopolitan city. This article shows that the dynamics of Mumbai Muḥarram can be fully comprehended if it is examined as an urban ritual, not as merely a Shiʿi or religious event. Moreover, the discussions of this article, I hope, reveal that Mumbai’s cosmopolitan process cannot be formulated without paying particular attention to community struggles during the liminal time of rituals, which avoids reducing urban interactions into the everyday life and conventional class-struggle-based analyses.

Acknowledgments

This article is an outcome of my research project at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG). My fieldwork in 2009–2010 was carried out under the financial support of MPI-MMG, although the article was written much later when I was an academic visitor at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin in 2021, sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The initial idea of this article was previously presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Toronto, Canada in March 2017.