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university of gttingen and utrecht university

Mediality and Materiality in Religious Performance: Religion as Heritage in Mauritius Patrick Eisenlohr

mediality and materiality in religious performance: religion as heritage in mauritius patrick eisenlohr

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ABSTraCT
In Mauritius, religious performance often doubles as ofcially recognized diasporic heritage, institutionalized as a component of Mauritians ancestral cultures. Such forms of religious expression not only point to a source of authority outside Mauritius but also play a key role in legitimizing claims on Mauritian citizenship. In this article, I examine two kinds of practices that help to instantiate religious links as heritage: ritual performance combined with the cultivation of ancestral language in the context of a Hindu pilgrimage and the role of sound reproduction techniques in popularizing a particular genre of Islamic devotional poetry. I argue that these embodied and material practices illustrate two contrasting modes of engaging with spatially and temporally removed sources of authenticity. While the pilgrimage aims at naturalizing diasporic links through their objectication and iconization, uses of sound reproduction technology in Islamic devotional contexts establish links to sources of religious authority under the assumption that the medium used is relatively transparent. Ultimately, the modalities of materiality presupposed in the ethnographic examples account for the authenticating effect of religion as heritage. Keywords: diaspora, Hinduism, Islam, media, ritual, religious authority

Patrick Eisenlohr is Professor of Modern Indian Studies at the University of Gttingen and Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University. He previously held positions at Washington University in St Louis and New York University, and has conducted research on transnational Hindu and Muslim networks, language and diaspora, and media technology in Mauritius and India.

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Frequently, the notions of heritage and religion stand in tension with each other, and the convergence of both might seem to require much explanation. In Mauritius, however, the two elds are widely regarded, by both state authorities and the broader public alike, as inseparably linked. Mauritius, as a former plantation colony with no pre-colonial population has adopted a nation-building strategy that not only highlights the fact that all Mauritians have origins in other parts of the world, but also makes the ongoing cultivation of links to diasporic origins central to membership in the Mauritian nation (Eisenlohr 2006a; Lowe Swift 2007). The majority of Mauritians are therefore expected to adhere to ofcially designated ancestral cultures and also to study associated ancestral languages at school. Almost 70 percent of the Mauritian population is of Indian origin. The large majority is descended from indentured laborers who were brought to Mauritius to work in the sugar industry after the abolition of slavery in 1834, but they also include the descendants of free migrants who entered Mauritius as merchants with their own capital. According to the constitution, Mauritians of Indian origin are ofcially classied as either Hindu or Muslim (52 percent and 17 percent of the population, respectively), while Hindus can be further subdivided into Hindus of north Indian background (41 percent) and smaller groups of Tamil, Telugu, and Maharashtrian origin. Middle-class Hindus of north Indian origin dominate the Mauritian government and state apparatus. Not only does religion play a decisive role in dening and delineating communities of Indo-Mauritians according to the constitution, but also the Mauritian state apparatus as well as most Mauritians in everyday contexts roundly identify their ancestral cultures and ancestral languages with religious traditions, different strands of Hinduism and Islam, respectively. Thus, a discourse according to which the production of heritage out of religious traditions might profanize religion and dilute the sacred quality of religious traditions does not seem to be very relevant to the issue of Mauritian ancestral cultures.1 In Mauritius the production of diasporic heritage ofcially referred to as ancestral cultures, a mode of non-homogenizing nation-building that intensies communal boundaries between citizens, and Mauritians religious identications and practices are tightly interconnected. Nevertheless, this is not to state that Mauritian religion is entirely unaffected by such a politics of heritagization, as the complex of ancestral culture is above all a meeting ground of religious traditions and state power. As such, religion as heritage in Mauritius inevitably raises questions of governmentality and the regulation of religion.2 This is

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all the more the case since the showcasing of diversity is the dominant nation-building strategy in Mauritius, and because among the different dimensions of diversity, religious difference is perhaps the most important. Not only does association with a recognized ancestral and religious tradition support claims to be part of the Mauritian diasporic mosaic, and therefore the nation dened accordingly. Mauritian state institutions actually place a lot of condence in religious traditions to turn Mauritians into morally grounded and productive citizens capable of peaceful coexistence. This approach to regulating religion is informed by a Gandhian vision of religion according to which religion should not be sidelined in nation-building under conditions of great diversity. Instead, religion will turn Mauritians into good citizens, and therefore the state should support and encourage the cultivation of ancestral culture. Following this discourse and administrative practice, such true and supposedly authentic religion needs to be sharply distinguished from the destructive instrumentalization of religion for political ends that in Mauritius as in India is commonly referred to as communalism. It is this remarkable trust placed in the cultivation of such genuine religion coupled with its entanglement in state regulation due to the denition of religious boundaries, the nancing and support of religious organizations and activities, and the enrolment of students in the study of particular ancestral languages on a strictly ethno-religious basis that characterizes the production of religion as diasporic heritage in Mauritius. Modern state regulating and governing of religion is in fact a crucial format for the making of religious heritage that is widely identied with diasporic heritage in Mauritius. There, the claiming of diasporic links does not contradict the homogenizing tendencies of the modern nation-state. On the contrary, such claims and their recognition actually constitute a predominant modus of nation-building. While the centrality of diasporic links drawing on religious networks is relatively obvious for students of Mauritian ethnic and religious diversity, the question remains how such links come to be produced and instantiated in a manner that appears convincing to many Mauritians. Essentially, this is the question of how the large qualitative, temporal, and spatial gaps between the lifeworlds of contemporary Mauritians, the world of their Indian ancestors, and centers of religious authority located elsewhere can be bridged. In this article, I analyze two examples of religious performance that aim at minimizing these distinctions. My suggestion is that we need to investigate the processes of mediation accomplishing this creation of plausible links across such substantial

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Hindu Pilgrimage, Sacred Geographies, and Hindi as Ancestral Language in Mauritius

My rst example is the interplay between a major Hindu pilgrimage in Mauritius and the language ideology of

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gaps in a manner that addresses the interconnected quality of their semiotic and their material dimensions. For this, an approach is needed that does not treat signication and materiality as opposites, but that takes account of the intertwining of both these dimensions of mediating across qualitative and spatio-temporal gaps. In my view, a Peircean approach to semiotics is best suited to overcoming the widely assumed opposition between immaterial signication and material presence of objects, especially through its deployment of the notions of indexicality and iconicity that encompass both (Parmentier 1994; Peirce 1932; Silverstein 1993). The question of religious mediation evokes a new emphasis on studying contemporary media practices in religious settings while being aware of the intrinsic links between religion and media. Such links exist since religion always involves processes of interaction between practitioners and a religious otherworld, however conceived, that are supported by a broad range of media technologies (de Vries 2001: 28; Lutgendorf 1995; Morris 2002; Meyer 2006: 3024; Schulz 2006). Further, we also need to be particularly attentive to the local conceptualizations and ideologies of the material. The different modes of materiality are especially important in the contexts of religious performance and mediation I am going to analyze here, as in recent critiques of a notion of religion centered on belief, the material dimensions of religion have drawn much scholarly attention (Meyer 2012; Meyer and Houtman 2012). A renewed focus on the material is a much-needed corrective to a situation in which the study of religion itself has inherited the Enlightenment project of the evolution of religion toward interiority, transcendence, and reason, indeed toward religions evaporation (Meyer and Houtman 2012: 16). One of my goals in this article is to emphasize the interdependence of the semiotic and material perspectives on religious phenomena, as I seek to account for processes of religious mediation that accomplish a rapprochement of religious practitioners with deities, while at the same time also narrowing a perceived diasporic gap. The forms of religious mediation I analyze in this article also authenticate religion as heritage in the specic setting of Mauritius, where the cultivation of diasporic origins based on religion are an important means of inclusion in the nation.

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Hindi as ancestral language of Mauritian Hindus. Each year in February on the occasion of the Hindu festival of Shivratri, out of a total population of 1.2 million, around 400,000 pilgrims make the journey to Grand Bassin, a small mountain lake that is also known among Hindus as Ganga Talao (Ganges Pond) (Figure 1). Since independence, Hindu organizations with support from the Mauritian and Indian governments have turned this relatively remote lake into a major center of pilgrimage building temples, access roads, parking terrains, and other infrastructure, and surrounding the lake with steps (ghat) reaching down to the shore in the manner of Hindu places of pilgrimage located on sacred bodies of water (tirth) in India. As such, Grand Bassin with its spatial layout, its traditional temple architecture that signicantly differs and looks more Indian compared to the plainer concrete architecture of most Hindu temples found in Mauritian towns and villages is intended to resemble Hindu sacred landscapes in India. Also the sight of pilgrims descending on the ghat to fetch the sacred water and to immerse ritual objects in it underlines the sites appearance as an iconic replica of similar places of pilgrimage in India. Further, the name of the oldest and most prominent temple at Grand BassinKashi Vishvanath Mandiris identical to the most prominent temple in the sacred city of Banaras on the Ganges in north India, perhaps the most signicant of all tirth in India. Another major temple is known as Mauritiuswarnath Mandir. This temple dedicated to the deity Shiva houses a shivling that is claimed to be comparable in religious standing to twelve other famous lingam, or manifestations of Shiva in India. This attempt to extend a sacred Indian geography to Mauritius is underlined by a table in the temple that lists the trayodash jyotir lingam, twelve lingam in prominent places of Hindu pilgrimage in India such as Somnath, Banares, Kedarnath, Nasik, and Ujjain, while number thirteen reads: Mauritiuswarnath ji: On the bank of Ganga Talab, Mauritius (Ganga talab being the Hindi name for Grand Bassin). Since pilgrimage to Grand Bassin started on a very small scale more than a century ago, legends circulated according to which the small mountain lake features a subterranean connection to the Ganges in India. Thus, in addition to the overall iconic resemblance of its visual appearance, spatial arrangements, and patterns of ritual use to Indian places of pilgrimage on sacred bodies of water, from the perspective of many the waters of Grand Bassin are also consubstantial with the waters of the sacred Ganges in India. In addition, the annual movement of pilgrims from all over Mauritius as well as from elsewhere in the Indian Ocean region, such as South

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Africa and the neighboring French island of La Runion, to Grand Bassin mirrors the rhythmic ows of pilgrimage at similar sites in India, and actually constitutes much of the lived experience that makes Grand Bassin such a signicant location in the lives of many Hindu Mauritians. This replication of a Hindu sacred geography with its spatial, infrastructural, and architectural layout, together with the temporally structured movement of people turned into devotees through it, provides a powerful means of bridging the very substantial diasporic gap between the worlds of the immigrant ancestors and present-day Hindu Mauritians. For example, in 1998 the Shivratri pilgrimage coincided with the hundredth anniversary of Grand Bassin as a pilgrimage site, which immigrating Hindu ancestors had then discovered and identied as a sacred place, inaugurating the pilgrimage, which has in the meantime turned into the single largest religious event in Mauritius. In speeches and on visual displays the heroic qualities of the valiant ancestors were extolled, who managed to tenaciously preserve Hindu traditions under conditions of oppression, exile, and deprivation. At least during the performance of the pilgrimage, Hindu Mauritians can feel one with their ancestors, sidelining the great spatial,

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FIG 1 The Hindu pilgrimage site of Grand Bassin. (Photograph: the author.)

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temporal, and qualitative differences between their own lives and the lifeworlds of their north Indian ancestors. This effect is compounded through another dimension of Mauritian ancestral culture, the centrality of politically charged notions about language in it. As mentioned, the different communities distinguished by the Mauritian state as well as the larger public claim ancestral languages as part of their institutionalized heritage and expect state institutions and representatives to recognize and support their cultivation. Hindi, the language claimed by Hindu Mauritians of north Indian ancestry is by far the most important and most studied of these ancestral languages (Eisenlohr 2006a). The identication of such languages occurred when migration to Mauritius had reached its end, and does not imply that actual ancestors from present-day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar had knowledge of Hindi. The latters rst language was predominantly a range of varieties of Bhojpuri, while knowledge of standardized languages and literacy was limited among them. Modern Standard Hindi was only created and standardized in the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when indentured migration to Mauritius was already well under way, and its rise is closely linked to the formation of Hindu political mobilization and nationalism in colonial India. Thus the institutionalization of an ancestral language of Hindus of north Indian background is not a survival of cultural practices in India, but the product of circumstances in Mauritius after migration had ended, when emerging Indo-Mauritian elites struggled to establish political and religious connections to India while striving for recognition by the colonial government in Mauritiuss highly plural and stratied plantation society. The question thus remains how a language that most ancestors actually did not know and that had to be learned anew in Mauritius has come to be regarded not only as indexing India as a Hindu homeland, but also specically as the language of the ancestors, reinforcing its role as an important focus of Hindu identication and political mobilization. Hindi is taught in schools to Hindu children on an ethnic basis, while religious institutions such as local temple associations also offer Hindi classes. This institutional recognition and support is important in stabilizing the notion of Hindi as an ancestral language in the sense of a language of ethno-religious identication different from everyday vernacular languages which for Hindu Mauritians are Mauritian Creole and Bhojpuri, the former is clearly predominant in everyday life. But it is also its performance in ritual contexts such as the Shivratri pilgrimage that accounts for its role as ancestral language. During the pilgrimage, Creole-speaking

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pilgrims listen to slogans and religious hymns (bhajan) in Hindi, while Mauritian and Indian politicians and religious dignitaries deliver sermons and speeches in Hindi that are also simultaneously broadcast on national television and radio. Chanting Hindi bhajan, pilgrims also use Hindi in Devanagari script to display the name of their home village or town, as well as the names of their local Hindu association or youth club on kanvar. These are colorfully decorated bamboo structures in the shape of Hindu temples, displaying images of Hindu deities or the sacred sound om that pilgrims carry along with them on the Shivratri pilgrimage. Brass vessels (lota) are traditionally xed to the ends of the bamboo poles of the structures to carry the lakes sacred water back home to the pilgrims home communities for use in temples or domestic ritual. During my eldwork in 19971998 and 2003, pilgrims were also confronted with other visual displays of Hindi in Devanagari script, such as of the names of the temples, as well as of slogans such as Hindi rishion ki bhasa hai (Hindi is the language of the ancient sages) (Figure 2), which was displayed on a large tent erected by the Human Service Trust, a Hindu organization with close links to Hindu nationalists in India. Hindu activists often highlight the ways in which the ancestors overcame great obstacles and made big

FIG 2 Hindi is the language of the ancient sages. (Photograph: the author.)

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sacrices to preserve Hindu traditions on the island, and as such the pilgrimage on foot is not only a religious ritual, but also a reenactment and commemoration of the suffering and perseverance of the ancestors, accompanied by objectivized displays and performances of Hindi as the language of those ancestors. The pilgrims in turn encounter such emblematic uses of Hindi that also help to mark off the pilgrimage and other ritual events from contexts of everyday life. Despite the diverse attitudes and motivations among Hindu Mauritians who make the pilgrimage that do not always coincide with the ofcial ideologies of ancestral culture propagated by Hindu organization and state institutions, the Shivratri pilgrimage provides a nationwide focus on Hindi as the language of the ancestors. It makes the movement through a replicated sacred landscape combined with the cultivation of Hindi capable of being experienced as a rapprochement with the world of the Indian ancestors, in which the great temporal and spatial gaps separating present-day Hindu Mauritians from their Indian ancestors are momentarily suspended. The ideology of Hindi as an ancestral language, put in motion in the context of the pilgrimage in which pilgrims move through a sacred geography as a lived environment that stands in an iconic relationship with the imagined worlds of the Indian ancestors, accomplishes this minimizing of the diasporic gap. Furthermore, the sense of Hindi as ancestral language bridging the spatial and temporal gaps between presentday Hindu Mauritians and the worlds of their Indian immigrant ancestors rests on particular processes of objectication (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012: 3602). Hindi as a linguistic practice is certainly always embedded in the materialities of performance that manifest themselves in its embodied and sonic dimensions, as well as the materialities of its concrete settings. However, the context of the Shivratri pilgrimage reinforces such more general material dimensions of language through objectifying Hindi in particular ways. Not only does the pilgrimage reproduce the sense of the disparate linguistic practices labeled Hindi as a bounded language with its history of standardization and institutionalization in India, and its establishment as government-sponsored ancestral language in Mauritian schools. It also makes Hindi part of material and graphic artifacts (Hull 2012) central to the pilgrimage such as kanvar and visual displays of Hindi names of temples, as well as poetry and slogans. Furthermore, Hindi and its ancestral qualities have become part of the re-created sacred landscape at Grand Bassin through its ofcial renaming with a Hindi term/descriptor in 1972, when a vessel of sacred Ganges water (ganga jal)

was own in from the Indian pilgrimage city of Haridwar with the assistance of the Indian government, and ritually discharged in the lake, consecrating the latter as Ganga Talab (Ganges pond/lake).3 A complex bundling (Keane 2003: 414) of linguistic signs, graphic artifacts, landscape, the qualities deemed ancestral and Indian, and religious performance help bring about the sense of ancestral culture as heritage in the context of the Shivratri pilgrimage. The materiality of signs, including linguistic signs, enables their traveling (Keane 2001: 73), and in their particular forms make possible the establishment of diasporic links that undergird the broader notion of ancestral culture based on religious traditions in Mauritius. Both the reproduction of a sacred geography at Grand Bassin as well as the highlighting of the ancestral qualities of Hindi feature a foregrounding of qualities shared between the world of the Indian ancestors and the Shivratri pilgrimage, as evident in the materiality of landscape and buildings and the objectication of Hindi as ancestral language. In semiotic terms, the indexical relationships established in the process of diasporization are transformed into icons (Irvine and Gal 2000). At the same time, there are considerable political stakes tied to the materiality of these diasporic links, as the notion of ancestral culturethe specic form that heritage takes in Mauritius4legitimizes inclusion and centrality in the nation. Therefore the naturalizing effects produced by the objectication and iconization of such diasporic links are particularly important, as the complex of ancestral cultures underwrites ideologies of nation-building and relationships of rivalry and competition among what Mauritians and the Mauritian state often take to be ethnoreligious communities as constituting elements of the nation as a diasporic mosaic.

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Hindu pilgrimage and Hindi as an ancestral language of Mauritian Hindus are not the only ways in which religion constitutes diasporic heritage in Mauritius. Religious performance also works to establish such links in other ways. For my second example, I draw on my research on the circulation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims. The question of ofcially recognized ancestral language also plays a role in this example, since this poetry is in Urdu, one of the two recognized ancestral languages of Mauritian Muslims (the other is Arabic). However, in contrast to the rst example, the mediation of the diasporic gap is not effected through pilgrimage in a reproduced sacred Indian geography

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Sound Reproduction and Voice in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practice

Mediality and Materiality in Religious Performance: Religion as Heritage in Mauritius Patrick Eisenlohr

FIG 3 Audio CDs and DVDs on sale in front of the Jummah Mosque, Port Louis. (Photograph: the author.)

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combined with the ideology of ancestral language, but through particular assumptions about sound reproduction media technologies as they are activated in performing and listening to the poetry. Also, the objectication of the links bridging the diasporic gap is less at issue here. In contrast, the object-like materiality of the medium bridging such a gap, in this case sound reproduction technology, is actually denied in a specic way. Nat, an Urdu genre of praise poetry in honor of the Prophet has long been part of Mauritian Muslim devotional life. In recent years, however, its circulation through audiocassettes and later audio and video CDs (Figure 3) as well as mp3 disks and sound les downloaded from websites has led to greater popularity of this genre, which at the same time plays an important role in intra-Muslim sectarian differentiation (Eisenlohr 2006b). The cultivation of nat is a hallmark of the South Asian Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jamaat tradition, which the majority of Sunni Muslims in South Asia and Mauritius follow and which distinguishes itself through a particular combination of Su and ulemabased traditions of Islam (Sanyal 1996). Praising and invoking the Prophets presence through reciting nat is

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part of a larger complex of spiritual intercession favored by the Ahl-e Sunnat that in turn has been severely criticized by more purist Sunni reformist movements such as the school of Deoband, not to speak of Salainspired currents. Defending the legitimacy of reciting nat has therefore become a salient issue in intra-Muslim sectarianism in both South Asia and its diasporas such as in Mauritius, and uses of contemporary media technology have come to play a major part in it. The main role of sound reproduction technologies in the cultivation of nat is that recordings of performances of accomplished reciters from Pakistan, India, and also of a few Mauritians are taken to be authoritative models of correct devotional practice informing the way in which nat is performed in established ritual settings in Mauritius. There is great concern about the authenticity and appropriateness of the poetry as well as the correct performative style, and the circulating recordings are drawn upon as authoritative guides. Especially the dimension of performative style is a very sensitive issue, because of fears that the recitation of the poetry may be inuenced by the music of the Hindi cinema in a Mauritian environment where Bollywood musical and cinematic entertainment is ubiquitous. Overall there is great concern among Mauritians Muslims, a minority who often regard themselves as far removed from the centers of authority of the Muslim world, about the appropriateness and authenticity of their religious practices. Many Mauritian Muslims take digital audio and audiovisual recordings of performances of accomplished nat khwan (nat reciters) from Pakistan and India to be authoritative models of recitational comportment and voice quality. The underlying assumption is that sound reproduction technologies serve as mediators bridging the diasporic gap that separates Mauritian Muslims from centers of religious authority and authenticity located in South Asia and beyond. They accomplish this by safeguarding the authentic transmission of this devotional poetry across different performative contexts. The transmission and circulation of nat from one performative context to the next is part of a larger complex of genealogical authority that features prominently in Islamic traditions. Therefore, the control and safeguarding of this circulation is of supreme importance for this religious practice and its hoped-for transformative effects. Particular attention is paid to qualities in both the poetic text and its mode of performance pointing to a context of origin that in turn is associated with authoritative authorship, as many nat are attributed to well-known Indian Islamic scholars or poet-saints.

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This context of authoritative authorship extends well beyond the dimension of textual accuracy, of the sort that could be mediated by print. In several ways, the importance of the specically performative dimensions of engaging with Islamic texts that is so much in evidence in the cultivation of nat can be traced to a larger complex of logocentric recitationalism dominant in Islamic traditions (Messick 1993). Logocentric recitationalism is a way of denoting a form of religious mediation, where the reciting voice summons the divine, functioning as the locus of divine presence in ritual practice. This is especially so in the case of scripture, but can also serve as a broader paradigm for the engagement with other textual genres, such as in my example, the recitation of nat in honor of the Prophet. But more specically for nat, its performative dimension points to contexts of poetic authorship that are characterized by a mood of deep piety and emotion supposedly felt by the learned poet-scholars in their original moments of composition and enunciation. For example, according to one of my interlocutors, a young Urdu teacher and nat khwan, the founder of the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jamaat tradition, Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi (18561921), composed some of his most evocative and moving poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad in moments when the Prophet himself appeared before him, and caused him to be overwhelmed by powerful emotions and attachment. Thus, performing nat appropriately therefore also aims at least in part at re-creating such a sacred context and the sensations it provokes. That is, at issue is not the mere replication of poetry in the sense of repeating a formulaic utterance or in reciting scripture, where the person actually uttering the words inhabits the participant role of a mere animator or relayer, to use Erving Goffmans terms (Goffman 1974). In this role the reciter is clearly in a distinct position from either the roles of the composer, or the role of the sponsor of a speech event who takes overall responsibility for what is said. In contrast, in the recitation of nat, the reciter very much inhabits the discursive I of the poetic text, and seeks to merge his agency with that of the distinguished poetscholar assumed to be the origin of the poem. Nat as texts are often in the form of personal invocation of the Prophet, and the reciter does not merely replicate the poem as a relayer of someone elses words, but also takes active and personal responsibility for what is being uttered. In fact, this is why the reciting of nat is held to be benecial for those who participate in it. Formally speaking, the recitation of nat projects a past authoritative origin that can in principle be accessed. The re- and de-contextualization of the poetic texts in the course of

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their transmission thus happens in such a way that its performance in a new context involves features that point to such an authoritative context of origin, characterized by the utterance of a learned poet-scholar or saint in a moment of divine inspiration. The electronic circulation of nat through sound reproduction technology has now come to play a key role in its transmission and reinsertion into new performative contexts. Compared with print, sound reproduction affords more possibilities to retrieve sonic tokens with their material and iconic qualities. For this reason, Mauritian Muslims use sound reproduction in order to support the transmission of the specically performative dimension. This is one of the reasons why from the 1980s onwards the circulation of cassette recordings of nat performances and nowadays its circulation on audio CDs and mp3 disks, and lately also on sound les downloaded from the Internet has become very common, leading in turn to further popularization of nat. Such media have rst of all enabled the listening to nat outside established ritual settings and times. However, Mauritian Muslims also use sound reproduction technologies as a guide for performing nat in established ritual settings, most importantly the religious speech event mahl-e mawlud. While printed texts of nat poetry have long circulated in Mauritius, Mauritian Muslims now frequently model the recitation of nat in the context of mahl-e mawlud on the recordings of performances by accomplished nat khwan. They closely listen to these recordings in order to make a program for such sessions of recitation on the occasions of the birthday of the Prophet or other Islamic authorities such as major Su saints, weddings, or other auspicious occasions in peoples lives. Tackling the challenge of how to effect appropriate transmission in circulating nat texts from one context to the next is thus nowadays supported by uses of sound reproduction technologies. In conversations with my interlocutors, comments about the kinds of voices nat reciters should have and how they sounded were a recurring theme (Eisenlohr 2006b, 2010). In re-creating the emotive context of performance possibly resembling the context of authoritative authorship, the quality of vocalization played a key role for my interlocutors, which they held mostly responsible for the touching and piously transformative effects of nat recitation. The style and vocalization of recitation should be highly melodious, but they are normatively set off from singing and music. They are markedly emotive but still display enough moderation and decorum, avoiding the agitation and excess of the lm style (lmi taraz). My interlocutors treated the

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digitized recordings of the performances of recognized nat reciters as a means of faithful storage and reproduction of such important qualities of the voice. That is, in contrast to print, Mauritian Muslims approach sound reproduction as a medium that reliably stores and transmits the crucial performative dimensions of nat that are central to its efcacy as a transformative practice. In an important way, this view depends on a particular conception of the link between religious mediation and materiality. For my interlocutors, the reproduction of particular voice qualities they variously described as clear, clean (prop), beautiful (zoli), touching, from the heart (dil se) are essential to the efcaciousness of the nat genre. That is, their attention is particularly focused on what in the semiotic literature is known as the tone or qualisign of the linguistic token, to use Peirces terminology (Peirce 1932: 142; see also Munn 1992: 1617). Here, these are qualities of the voice that stand in an iconic relationship to overall desired or aimed-for qualities of nat recitation as a process of religious mediation with its emotive dimension. At the center of attention are particular properties of the acoustic signals that compose a part of the linguistic signs, but also clearly go beyond the realm of linguistic signication. Safeguarding the material properties of this aspect of religious performance, the sound waves, and the timbre of the voice is just as important for the successful traveling of nat from context to context as is textual accuracy and authenticity. This is because the perceived faithful reproduction of such material aspects is, so to speak, one of the felicity conditions of nat recitation as religious performance. Those Mauritian Muslims favoring the cultivation of this devotional genre in turn tend to regard sound reproduction technologies as a transparent mediator that erases its own traces, and seems to enable the faithful storage and transmission of the performative characteristics of nat, especially qualities of the voice. Here, uses of sound reproduction in this religious context illustrate the double aspect of media technologies described by media theorists such as Bolter and Grusin (1999) as remediation: their oscillation between highly salient and perceptible states, and those moments when in the course of their normal operation their users attention is so exclusively focused on the images, sound, or discourse that are mediated through them so that media technologies complex material infrastructures and objectual qualities disappear from awareness. According to the media- and semiotic ideology widespread among Mauritian Muslims, sound reproduction enables an immediate connection between the context of religious performance at hand,

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and the projected past context of authoritative authorship and enunciation of the poetry. From such a perspective, sound reproduction appears to condense the long chains of transmission that lie between the present context of performance, and the assumed authorizing origin of the practice. The long sequences of de- and recontextualization of nat with their enormous potentials for transformation, reinterpretation, and alteration of multiple kinds are not only stabilized, but made to literally disappear, as this media practice conveys the sense of an immediate link to a setting where a recognized scholarpoet composed and uttered the poetry in a moment of divine inspiration and presence. In this sense, compared to print, sound reproduction, if working properly, is treated as a vanishing medium (Eisenlohr 2011). The necessity to maintain qualitative integrity from sonic token to token in the circulation of nat from one performative context to the next has its base in concerns about the authenticity of nat, the appropriateness of its performance, as well as a larger religious paradigm of genealogical authority revolving around the circulation of texts. Among those cultivating the nat genre, such wishes for the collapsing of deictic differentiation between source and target performance are now frequently projected on sound reproduction technology. But as for example in the case of audio CD technology, the transducing of the original sound waves into plastic bumps on a disk that can be optically read to reassemble an acoustic signal that more or less resembles the original sound waves is a procedure whose outcome is contingent on the playback device, the acoustic space of reproduction, and, perhaps most importantly the listening habits and evaluative faculties of the audience. This is not only a complex material process, but also one in which no perfect reproduction of an acoustic token is ever likely, even though listeners may evaluate the outcome as the same, in fact subsuming different sonic tokens under the same semiotic type. Therein lies the crucial role played by the listening habits and evaluative faculties of the audience, as opposed to the apparatus of reproduction as such, that are in turn informed by semiotic, and more specically media ideologies, basic assumptions about the nature of particular media and their functioning and effects, that can in turn often be traced to religious doctrines or cosmologies. According to the semiotic ideology that informs many Mauritian Muslims uses of sound reproduction in ritual settings, digital sound reproduction technologies enable the precise storing of sonic tokens. This is why this media technology in all its complex material artice appears as a mediator that leaves

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no traces of its own as it seemingly enables immediate access to authoritative performances. The question of the material is thus central to such media practices that have become an integral part of the cultivation and performance of nat. Its position is, however, deeply contradictory. On one hand, the storage and transmission of material, here sonic qualities, especially the vocalization of linguistic forms is essential, and their successful safeguarding is attributed to sound reproduction. On the other hand, in the process of operating in expected ways, sound reproduction technology phenomenologically disappears as a complex material infrastructure, as it renders the particular soughtafter vocalization so real it vanishes as a perceived in-between. Here, the material qualities of the entire performative setting, so central to the efcacy of nat as a form of religious mediation are simultaneously highlighted and denied.

Conclusion
In this article I have compared two modes of producing religion as heritage in a diasporic setting. I have argued that they illustrate alternative ways of reducing the distance between centers of authority and authenticity located elsewhere and the lifeworlds of Mauritians of Indian background. Sacred landscapes, ancestral language, and sound reproduction technology all function as media of such diasporic relationships whose workings are greatly inuenced by their specic materiality and the varying assumptions Mauritians of Indian background hold about such materiality, including the ways in which they highlight or deny materiality. In this respect, the two modes of connecting religious life among Mauritians of Indian background with sources of diasporic authority resulting in the production of religious heritage illustrate contrasting strategies with regard to the foregrounding or downplaying of their materiality. While the Shivratri pilgrimage in the re-created sacred landscape of Grand Bassin strongly emphasizes the material aspect of the diasporic link established, the treatment of sound reproduction technology as a vanishing medium tends to elide the technologys materiality, even as it highlights the sonic qualities of linguistic forms. At the same time, the materiality of the medium that connects religious life among Mauritians of Indian background to sources of diasporic authority also contain the possibility of creating the effect of the inauthentic. The performances I have described in this article are precarious achievements subject to misre. They are bound up with material qualities and objects as enabling

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condition for the links to be established. However, this circumstance also exposes the performances to the risk of failure (compare Keane 2001: 69). Sound reproduction technology authenticates the performance of devotional poetry for many Mauritian Muslims, but the fact that the same technology is also used in commercial music and lm entertainment also puts it in the realm of the questionable for some. Moreover, the materiality of linguistic signs including their objectications that are the condition of possibility for their circulation and reinsertion into new contexts also makes them available for new interpretations. Such slippages of meaning also apply to the presence and performance of Hindi at the Shivratri pilgrimage. For some, the obvious association of Hindi with Hindu politics and the politics of ancestral culture in a context of ethnic competition in Mauritius make the use of the language seem overtly calculated and contrived, distant as it is from Mauritian Creole, the vernacular language of the pilgrims that is also dominant in interactions among Hindus during the pilgrimage. Whether foregrounded or denied, the materiality of these diasporic links exposes them to alternative uses and interpretations, raising the possibility of failed and inauthentic heritage.

notes and references

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See Basso (1996) for an account of language and landscape that highlights the signicance of place names. In 2012 the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority (MTPA) signed a memorandum of understanding with the countrys Council of Religions to promote religious heritage tourism as one of the elds of growth for the countrys very important tourism industry. As mentioned, religious heritage is usually referred to as ancestral

The centrality of state intervention and regulation is also obvious in other elds of heritage production (Bendix, Eggert, and Peselmann 2012). The case of religion as heritage, however, draws on

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A related debate about the presumably more secular character of heritage can be found in the study of religious tourism. Myra Shackley (2001) for example distinguishes genuine pilgrims at sacred sites seeking religious experiences from more secular tourists consuming the site as religious heritage (see Timothy and Boyd 2003: 31). More recent work in this eld has questioned the usefulness of this distinction (Timothy and Olsen 2006).

the long traditions of governing religion and religious diversity that have brought about the modern comparative category of religion to begin with.

Mediality and Materiality in Religious Performance: Religion as Heritage in Mauritius Patrick Eisenlohr

culture in Mauritius, while the term religious heritage is now also enjoying increasing use because of its established position in international tourism promotion strategies. Since 2006 and 2008, respectively, there are also two recognized UNESCO world heritage sites in Mauritius, Apravasi Ghat, the former immigration depot in the port of the capital Port Louis where Indian indentured laborers arrived between 1834 and 1920 (Lowe Swift 2007), and Le Morne mountain, which was an important hiding place and holdout for maroon slaves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The recent promotion of religious heritage by the Mauritian tourism authorities also has to be seen in the context of the recent institutionalization of UNESCO notions of heritage in Mauritius.

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