Generating and mediating religious identities: Islamic healing rituals shared by Hindus and Muslims in the dargahs of Hyderabad, India

With trends away from textuality in religious studies, I explore how shared healing rituals reveal negotiated fluid religious identities between living communities of Hindus and Muslims in South India. The emotional core of Sufi saints often propels practitioners out of normative religious traditions in ways that challenge Western subject/object dialectic scholarship. Post-structuralist critiques of objectivity and recognition of negotiated identities in body and practice provide a powerful hermeneutic for these rituals. Tombs of Muslim saints (dargahs) often become important alternative power centers of local religiosity. My fieldwork shows that three dargahs in Hyderabad have become hubs of fluid inter-religious activity, with Hindus fully participating in otherwise Islamic rituals, even in the midst of bifurcating communal violence that has recently gripped the subcontinent. Framed within an exploration of convergent systems of medicine, sainthood and healing practices, I examine how Hindus conceive of and participate in these rituals as beyond identifiers associated with normative traditions. I examine how ritualizations enable Hindu participation in Islamic healing rituals that generates and mediates not only shared interreligious sacred space and time, but calls on the participants---whether Hindu or Muslim---in order to obtain relief from their ailments, radically to reorient power relationships and, therefore, self-identities, social structures and religious world views. This has reflexive epistemological implications for our concepts of ritual, sacrality, and religious identity construction. I examine how ritual participation may not only reflect and work within a particular theological and medical universe, but may itself be generative of its own worldview, mediating and blurring the borders of normative traditions, and may produce its own healing---integrating self-identity with familial and social reconciliation. I compare notions of Hindu and Islamic sainthood, and what this comparison may mean for conceiving of the sacred space and time within a tomb of a saint shared by both traditions. Finally, I provide ethnographic accounts of Hindu participation in Islamic healing rituals in three dargahs in Hyderabad: the Pahadi Sharif, the Miran Husayn Hamawi and Shah Musa Qadiri dargahs.