Following the Pir: Shared devotion in South India

"Following the Pir: Shared Devotion in South India" is an ethnographic study of the religious life of a village called Gugud&dotbelow;u in Andhra Pradesh. It focuses on the public event of Muharram in Gugud&dotbelow;u which takes on a strikingly-different color than Muharram as it is practiced by urban Shi'i communities across South Asia. This is due to the central place of a local pir, or saint, called Kullayappa. The story of Kullayappa is pivotal in Gugud&dotbelow;u's local religious culture, effectively displacing the better-known story of the Imam Hussain from Shi'a Islam, and each year 300,000 pilgrims from across South India visit this remote village to express their devotion to Kul&dotbelow;l&dotbelow;ayappa. The ten-day rituals of Muharram in Gugud&dotbelow;u function like a stage on which various global Islamic practices come to frame a local pir tradition surrounding the life story of Kul&dotbelow;l&dotbelow;ayappa and this dissertation focuses on the various rituals performed and the many narratives told during Muharram in Gugud&dotbelow;u. It also looks at how some devotees refashion their lives after Kul&dotbelow;l&dotbelow;ayappa's example, as they encounter it in the rituals and narratives of Muharram.;The public event of Muharram, however, has become a point of contention in Gugud&dotbelow;u, with various religious individuals and groups now disputing the significance of what happens in Gugud&dotbelow;u during Muharram. Despite this, the public rituals that are focused on the pir Kul&dotbelow;l&dotbelow;ayappa continue to be centrally-visible in Gugud&dotbelow;u's religious life, their tradition still maintaining a successful blending of various Hindu and Muslim practices. As part of its ethnographic aims, this dissertation records multiple interpretations of Muharram and Karbala as they are given in Gugud&dotbelow;u, and argues that this set of shared devotional practices in Gugud&dotbelow;u represent a distinctive local religious culture.;This dissertation also explores how attention to the religious life of Gugud&dotbelow;u expands our understanding of devotion to the martyrs of Karbala across the wider Muslim world. This exploration is done in a number of ways. The dissertation documents the local shared religious practices and pir narratives in a manner that acknowledges the tensions between Gugud&dotbelow;u's Muharram tradition and localized Islam in the village. It also analyzes localization as a process that creates and maintains both the local Muharram tradition and a kind of localized Islam. Finally, it tries is to comprehend the many-layered perceptions of these two processes as they are articulated by different caste groups in Gugud&dotbelow;u. In other words, this dissertation deals with the mutual constitution of Gugud&dotbelow;u's Muharram tradition and its variant of a localized Islam through the mediation of processes of localization.