Lost worlds: Perspectives of decline

among Shias of Hyderabad old city

Shireen Mirza

This article seeks to think about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways
former politically dominant communities seek to negotiate their ritual traditions by forging
newer relationships to modern time. The article offers an ethnography of decline among
the Shia community of Hyderabad old city, whose weakened political status by colonial
modernity speaks in different ways of the experience of the contemporary as diachronic
and not in succession with the past. These perceptions of decline describe the moral loss
of the Shia community through the spatial decline of Hyderabad old city, as a fallen state
that has been produced by Muslim actors in time as well as located in the nature of time
upon the community. The article reflects on the contradictory perceptions of decline that
describes the deprivations produced by time as well as implicates community actors as
offenders in time who are seen to persist with the performance of rituals as meaningless
actions. What are the relations to time being forged that make communities redefine culture
in ways that are temporally meaningful to them, given their representation of belonging to
the contemporary as implicating the decline of their civilisation?

Keywords: sociology of time, urban decline, ritual, memory and history, Indian Islam,
princely state of Hyderabad, Islamic Revolution in Iran

I
Introduction
Although the Shia community constitutes a minority amongst Muslims,
in the city of Hyderabad in Indias Deccan, they were dominant Muslim
elite. The community was founded on a theology of persecution that offers

Shireen Mirza is at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India.
Email: shireen.mirza@gmail.com

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SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/
Melbourne
DOI: 10.1177/0069966717697419
2/ Shireen Mirza

ethical memory as a means of bypassing the political structures imposed

by the ruling Sunni majority who pose an existential threat to the Shias.
Yet, in the city of Hyderabad, feudal class relationships forged between
the two communities established a common class of ruling elite that was
once politically influential as well as materially successful.
This was made possible by successive Muslim kingdoms that ruled
the area, of which the city of Hyderabad was the capital, founded by the
Indo-Persian Qutub Shahi dynasty in the 1580s. Hyderabad city was built
to monumentalise the establishment of Shiism as state religion in the
kingdom of Golconda (15121687), when Shiism was declared the official
religion in Safavid Iran (15021736). This medieval dynasty saw itself as
an extension of the Iranian Safavid kingdom, notwithstanding the territorial
disconnections posed by the Arabian Sea within the Indian Ocean.
Persian language experts, diplomats, political refugees, economic
migrants and a large merchant class trading in textiles, horses, dried fruits
and opium travelled from the Iranian port of Bushehr to Bombay, migrat-
ing further to Pune, Aurangabad or settling in Hyderabad (Green 2011).
Shia Iranian traders moved to port towns like Masulipatnam, engaging
in oceanic trade with the west and the east coast, as part of established
trade networks, linking Shia dynasties within the landlocked Deccan
plateau (Attewell 2010: 8). The Deccan court employed these Iranian
Shia settlers, amongst whom many acquired some sort of an upper caste
status through generational practices of endogamy and a discourse of
racial purity by which racial differentiation of their Iranian descent was
sought to be maintained.
A dominant public culture of Shiism was established in Hyderabad
that was patronised by the Indo-Persian Qutub Shahi dynasty, which
further gained popularity as part of the local courtly culture within the
predominantly Sunni Mughal vassal dynasty of the Asif Jahi (17241948)
or the Nizams, notwithstanding a brief interregnum during the Mughal
emperor Aurangzebs rule. The Shia elite also found recruitment within
the Nizams courts retaining their status of nobility, the most notable of
these being the Prime Minister, Mir Turab Ali Khan or the Salar Jung (in
office from 185383) in what came to be known as the princely state of
Hyderabad in British India.
The Shias of Hyderabad, like the 19th century Indian elite elsewhere,
aligned themselves with the colonial establishment, forging connections
with the colonial project to seek security to help preserve their political

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and social dominance within the princely state. Paradoxically, political

developments between 1798 and 1874, such as the Subsidiary alliance with
East India Company in 1798, heralded a transition of political power that
shifted economic capital away from the Shia quarters within Hyderabad
old city. The local Muslim rulers lost meaningful political power to the
British residents of the princely state.
While the political winds had slowly shifted for the Shias of Hyderabad
with onset of modernity in the mid-19th century, the formal loss of sov-
ereignty post the declaration of India as an independent union was both
sudden and dramatic (Jalal 2000). Unlike the rulers of other princely states
in British India, the Nizam of Hyderabad did not favour the ousting of
the colonial statehe wagered no stakes in the nationalist project and
refused to cede to the Indian Union. He continued to support the colonial
state even after the declaration of Indian independence, through which
he sought an independent status for the kingdom. Hyderabad remained
along with Junagadh and Kashmir, a princely state that refused to join the
Indian Union as demanded by Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
After protracted negotiations, a military action was planned known as the
Police Action in 1948, in which the Indian army forcefully intruded to
overthrow the princely state of Hyderabad and unify it into the territories
of the Indian Union.
The dramatic loss of power in postcolonial India for colonial elites,
who identified with the colonisers through concepts, such as symbolic
entailment (Luhrmann 1994),1 has been described as the inhibitions of
these native Englishmen in their inability to work (Fox 1984) or by
the persistence of their cultural system in the face of transformational
change where economic fortunes of subordinate castes altered codes
of conduct (Barnett 1973: 201). For the Shias of Hyderabad, the formal
fall of the princely state of Hyderabad and their forced inclusion into the
postcolonial nation meant an inescapable decline that had begun with
the establishment of British colonial rule, particularly after the defeat at

1
Tanya Luhrmanns study on the Parsi colonial elite shows that the Parsi identification
with colonial symbolism of racial masculinity gave rise to a masculine ethos of cultural
superiority that the Parsis have sought to emulate. Luhrmann uses the concept of symbolic
entailment to explain how shifts in power relations can cause a dramatic reversal in the
self-description of the community. The Parsis, she shows, are gripped with a sense of moral
failure that leads to the self-condemnation of the contemporary community-self (Luhrmann
1994: 33357).

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the 1857 rebellion. While the Shias trace their loss of political power to
colonial rule, the postcolonial state brought about a greater alienation.
The community altogether withdrew from the formal sphere of secular
politics and retreated into the personalised religious realm.
The weakened Shia was revitalised by the Islamic Revolution of Iran
in 1979 that acted as the second episode in the community mythology to
regenerate the diasporic Shia identity seen as in urgent need of revival, re-
making and rescuing. In particular, effects of the colonial disciplining of
religion as irrational ritualism and separate from public reason were sought
to be overturned, by re-articulating the religious as part of the political as
well as in continuity with historical time. This article describes these efforts
at community remaking in the aftermath of waning political power that
seeks to redefine the role of ritualism as well as its relation to the ethical
and the political. It explores the ways communities strive to respond to a
colonial mediation of modernity and effects of neoliberal urban processes
that are experienced as having wrecked life-worlds.2 What one finds in
the case of Shias of Hyderabad are common expressions of decline that
see the contemporary as a sign of concealed divinity, as moral decay and
urban decline.3 These expressions of decline, as I seek to show, return to

2
A large literature on tribal and indigenous worlds similarly describes the loss of traditional
community life-worlds, due to the displacement from land and disappearance of community-
owned forests (Kirsch 2001; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Read 1996). Deborah Rose, for instance,
describes aboriginal characterisation of land that is no longer managed by caretakers as a loss
of life, loss of support systems as well as loss of relationships with nature, far beyond mere
claims of loss of land ownership (Rose 1996: 2021). The sociology of decline in this literature
links material property to culture, nature, belonging and a social ecology of networks and
relationships. The realm of memory is highlighted as giving prominence to a sacred landscape
where all embedded stories of the past and ancestors are linked to physical location as part of
new strategies to preserve memories and identity. The return to a golden age of community
autonomy and control is made possible through a re-engagement with tradition, making it
possible to look for reasons of failure of the historical within the traditional.
3
Modern social science has paid little attention to the domain of collective emotions,
such as loss, melancholia and nostalgia that are non-evidentiary and yet persistent, dismissing
efforts of community revivalism as elitist, regressive and based on a politics of lack that
is unworthy of engagement. Sumathy Ramaswamy writing on loss describes its reduction
to pathology in the social sciencesas one that is unproductive and needs to be overcome
or curtailed (Ramaswamy 2004). Contrary to this, Ramaswamys work on the lost land
of Lemuria reminds us that the preoccupation with loss can be socially and materially
productive. Thoman Blom Hansens book Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian
Township in South Africa (2012) is also another instance of this.

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 Shias of Hyderabad old city /5

the sacred mythology of the inaugural loss of the community in order to

re-build it. They give rise to community efforts that not just preserve but
also remake the future, by returning to the inaugural moment and seeking
a new transcendental truth as a way of forging possible futures.
In what follows, I describe the narratives of decline that regularly
emerged in conversation with the Shias during my fieldwork in Hyderabad
periodically from 2008 to 2011. I explore within these conversations, tropes
of decline that extend to twin themes: of the community as being in a state
of moral decadence (we are an utterly degenerate society, I was told) as
well as of the urban deterioration of Hyderabads old city through the loss
of community property and orchards belonging to the erstwhile Shia nobil-
ity. I explore both themes, in order to understand the spatial identification
with the experience of becoming forgotten peoples, with ignored pasts
(Ramaswamy 2004). These narratives of decline are suffused with nostalgia
for the past, a time gone by, a lost sense of security and the inability to
reconcile with a changed political economy of colonial and postcolonial
India (Fabian 1983; Munn 1992; Sahlins 1983).4 Religious memory then
acts as a means of constant appraisal to remake community values as well
as possible futures. It therefore addresses the needs of the presentof
coping with the indignities of colonial rule and the ambiguities of national
belonging for minorities in postcolonial India (Boym 2010).

4
Much writing has linked nostalgia and an assertion of tradition as a product of modern time,
thereby interrogating the construction of tribe as a primordial category. Prathama Banerjee, for
instance, explores ways modern time retains the category of the primitive by reducing tribe to
the domain of culture and locality. She describes a temporal contradiction in ways the Bengali
tribe of the Santhals experience time. The relationship of the Santhali past to the present,
Banerjee argues, is a contradiction, a temporal split whereby historical time was split into two
in colonial Bengal: the modern and the primitive, giving rise to what she calls a temporal
schizophrenia. For the Santali, on the one hand, the present was experienced as debilitating
and as loss, where the indigenous peoples history by the nature of a historical explanation is
seen as economically backward blaming the primitive mentality for the present fallen state of
the colonised. On the other, the present was one of hope and freedom, which could be seen
as an inheritance of an ancient and glorious past. She reads the Santali rebellion as a mode
of repossessing and reshaping temporality of a colonial modernity, by invoking rebellion not
merely as a crucial inheritance of the past but also as the unfinished nature of the Santali past.
The resolution of the paradox of time was to carve a place outside history, where conversion
from mythic to a historical past led to newly rationalised time in which stories and memories
were preserved as object forms in the figure of the primordial that acted as a counterpoise to
history and the nation. In so doing, the remaking of the indigenous self is seen as an exercise
in doing history that carves a space outside it (see Prathama Banerjee 2002, 2006a, b).

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II
Personal and spatial decline
My summer school vacations from 1983 to 1996 were spent in Hyderabad
old city where we visited my grandmother who lived with my two aunts
and their families in the northern suburb of Hyderabad old city called
Chaderghat. By the time of my encounter with the old city, known through
my mothers house in Chaderghat, there was no posh suburb of the
British residents, but wreckages of old bungalows. Our house, for instance,
was used as a rest house by travelling Iranian students and merchants to
Hyderabad city, which by the 1980s was in dilapidated condition, divided
into three portions held together by a tiled roof that leaked during the
monsoons and blew away when the winds were strong.
The summer vacation was spent in a sort of family congregation with
my grandmother, my aunts and their children in the house, engaged in long
after-meal conversations dwelling almost always on the past. There were
two catastrophes in my grandmothers life that cast a shadow on how she
and my aunts talked of the past. The first was a more recent loss of her
firstborn child in 1988, who was on the flight from Iran to Dubai when
the United States navy shot down the civilian Iran Air Flight 655 in the
Sea of Bandar Abbas. My eldest aunt was in her 40s when she boarded
that flight. She was a professional translator at the time based in Tehran,
who translated texts from Persian to English and Urdu.
The second was when my grandmother was widowed in her mid-30s,
a few years after Indian independence, when her husband died unexpect-
edly of a sudden heart attack in the middle of the night. He left behind
five school-going daughters, a son, an infant (my mother) less than a few
months old, unclaimed land in Iran and an Urdu-medium school that
operated out of a rented portion of the house.
His death had left my grandmother unprepared to face the precarious
position that the family was suddenly reduced to, having lost their
status overnight. It had only been six years to the Police Action. At the
time, my grandmother and grandfather lived at the Royal Residence at
Bolarum in the suburb of the rapidly expanding Hyderabad city, away
from their home in the old city as well as the barracks of the British
residents at Secunderabad. At the palace in Bolarum, my grandfather
was employed as the controller of education and taught mathematics
to the grandsons of the Nizam. My grandmother described how the

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grandson of the Nizam, the infant and nominated heir Mukarram Jah,
would call out to the daughter she lost Mehlaqa! Mehlaqa! standing
outside their window. Mehlaqa, all of five, she remembered, dashed to
the pond for a swim.
The day the Police Action took place, a palace guard marched into
their quarters announcing the orders to immediately vacate the premises
of the palace: your belongings will be sent to you later, he signed off.
The family left the royal residence in the dirty clothes they were wearing,
never to return. On the radio, they heard the Nizams last address as Ruler,
announcing that the army of the Indian Union had entered Hyderabad city
and that defeat was imminentpleading for calm and requesting people
to remain indoors in the coming days. At the end of the broadcast, they
heard the Nizam weep.
After the Police Action, the British residents of the princely state
abandoned their barracks in Secunderabad, symbolic of the change in the
rulers of Hyderabad. My grandfather had begun to work as a university
faculty employed by the Indian state, teaching mathematics at Osmania
University. My grandmother described this as a change of parties when
circumstances changed (hum us taraf ho gaye jab daur badal gaya). After
the death of my grandfather, the family lived on the rent obtained from
the Urdu-medium school. They also received a one-time honorarium in
recognition for the services of my grandfather to the family of the Nizam.
The honorarium was dispatched with a letter expressing condolence from
Princess Durru Shehvar, the wife of the Nizam and mother to the heir
apparent Prince Mukarram Jah, also the daughter of the last Caliph and
Ottoman emperor.
When my grandmother spoke of the days of the princely state, she spoke
nostalgically of better days, when the quality of rice was the finest, each
grain long and fragrant. She spoke of it as a time when vegetables were
available in abundance, in sacks of cauliflowers, cabbage and potatoes
with an announcementthis needs to go to the controller sahib (sir).
The nostalgia for better days described a dissonance between what once
existed and what exists, as two distinct times punctuated by the loss of
her husband.
This nostalgic recollection of lost time, of seeing, year after year,
misty-eyed adults reminiscing on better days they have seen, evoked
through affectivities of nostalgia, fashioned an image of loss that I found
elsewhere during my fieldwork amongst Shias of Hyderabad old city.

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For instance, I was told of the glorious days of the old city, shared also
by other Muslim and Hindu residents, when they talk of the old city as
synonymous with better days. They broadly referred to a pre-urbanised era
when the temporal pace was slower, the River Musi was full, where open
space existed, the air was cleaner, people more civil and when a general
old worldly decorum of cultivated modes of address and comportment
existed. The story of the old city is popularly told as a story of spatial and
civilisational decline, as seemingly indicated in the decrepit state of its
current infrastructure, ruination of palaces and mansions of the erstwhile
nobility that gave way to urbanisation (Bawa 1987; Naidu 1990; Naidu
and Kamalakar 1988; Seshan 1993).
This story of decline is seen as part of a story of urbanisation prompted by
a dramatic demographic change post the violence of the Police Action that
resulted in an influx of rural Muslims and exodus of Hindus, making the old
city a predominantly Muslim area. The multiple deprivation of the old city is
told from the lack of sanitation and public roads due to the development of
slum-like pattern of settlements in the inner region of the city of Hyderabad
that adds to the representation of the old city as a place of ruinsof ruined
urbanisation and ruining by urbanisation (Simone 2004).
In revisiting memories of a lost and irrevocable time, what openings
did the past have I wondered, especially when the past was not experi-
enced in succession with the present? I found a wide and rich canvas of
descriptions of loss and urban decline that drew on the sacred memory
of the inaugural loss of the community described next, where moral
bankruptcy in the practice of religion and in modes of commemorating
the inaugural loss is seen as resulting in the contemporary as a condition
of backwardness and decline.

III
The inaugural loss
The Shia community collectively remembers the battle of Karbala that
took place in 680 ad in present-day Iraq as its inaugural moment. Karbala
was a political rebellion waged by Imam Hussain, the third Imam of the
Shia community and the grandson of the Prophet, against the Umayyad
Caliph. The rebellion is seen as a spectacular sacrifice of the lives of
women and children of the family of the Prophet, along with a small and
devoted army composed of his 72 companions and followers.

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The sacred event heralds at one level, a culmination of differences

about the various models of leadership of the Muslim community after
the Prophet. It acts as a drama of cessation within the Muslim com-
munity around the question of leadership, where the dominant group
of the Sunnis (believers in the Sunnah or actions of the Prophet) upheld
the principle of selection of the leader through consensus (ijma) of the
male elite to form a system of political governance called the caliphate
or the rightly guided. However, the splinter group of the Shias believed
that the Prophet declared Imam Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, as his
successor and maintained that leadership of the Muslim community is
the purview of the infallible (Imams) as legitimate spiritual and politi-
cal leaders who possess prerequisite divine qualities for governing the
community (umma).
At another level, the battle of Karbala is seen as the manifestation of
divinity in leadership of the community, as immanent and prophesied by
the Prophet. It reflects a cosmology of good and evil that displays a drama
of faith (iman) and a model for exemplary acts (Fischer 1980:25).
Here it is seen to uphold the principle of justice, rules of waging war and
familial relations through the willing sacrifice of ones life, including
little children as a form of re-establishing these values. Through physi-
cal annihilation and sacrifice of self and property, the political rebellion
becomes a parable about martyrdom and loss.
Karbala constitutes what Hamid Dabashi calls the inaugural moment of
injustice that forms the agitated memory of Shiism (Dabashi 2000: 487).5
The idea of Karbala as a paradigm signals Karbala as a mnemonic device

5
Dabashi refers to Karbala as the inaugural moment of injustice under which Shiism
was founded. He calls this the Karbala paradox, for according to him, Shiism produces
a transcendental philosophy based on insurrection. However, the instant its charismatic
leadership translates into political leadership, material success brings a moral failure,
which negates itself metaphysically, as soon as it succeeds politically. Shiism has
never surpassed its Karbala Paradox, he argues, which is constitutional to its moral and
material culture (Dabashi 2000: 484). Further, it produces paradoxes. First is the paradox
in which the ideals of justice produce a transcendental insurrectionary self along with a
collective memory of disenfranchisement, both of which are part of the historic collective
conscience. Second is its relation to the dominant, where by virtue of its own historical
roots, Shiism has been the historical other of Islam and believed in its own otherness
and its alterity, while at the same time dreaming of being the same and atrophying if
it becomes the same.

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that offers affective relations to the story of the communitys origin.6

Itprovides a model for living, an ever-repeating event, an always-foreseen
battle of good against evil that will not be resolved until Judgment Day
(Deeb 2007: 18), as well as a mnemonic for thinking about how to live
(Fischer 1980: 21).
This sacred landscape transpires in local contexts through objects as
well as ritual performances of collective memory.7 Annual commemorative
ceremonies held throughout the two months of Muharram and Safar all
over South Asia, for instance, re-live the story of Karbala by mnemoni-
cally relating the story of martyrdom, loss and regeneration of values in
vernacular idioms. The slain army is symbolically represented through
emblems, standards (alams), cenotaphs and black flags that embody the
ideal as well as connect the commemorator to the inaugural moment.8

6
The idea of Karbala as a paradigm was framed by Michael Fischer. The Karbala
paradigm, according to Fischer, combines three basic sets of information that is seen as
fundamental to understanding Shiism. It combines enacting practices of the battle of Karbala,
such as those that R. Strothman has called the passion plays of Iran or ritual recreations of
the original battle of Karbala in processions in South Asia and other place.7 Second, these
enactments were patronised by the state, where Shiism was established as state religion by
the Safavid dynasty in 1501 in Iran and elsewhere where Shiism was officially declared as
the state religion (Strothman 1953). The Karbala paradigm also provides recognition of the
systemic difference between Shia and Sunni understandings, as not so much an expression
of partisan struggle of succession after the Prophet but as an act of faith, an utterance or an
enactment of solidarity that bears witness to the perceived injustices against the people of
the party of Ali (Fischer 1980).
7
The importance of memory, in studying communities structured around commemorative
ceremonies around which community identities and personhood is forged, needs to
be emphasised here. It is important to note that studying collective remembrance is at one
level a study of representation or the symbolic, even though collective memory claims to
commemorate the original event as authentic, but is in its practice highly mediated deriving
mnemonically from the original event while continuing to be re-constituted within the
framework of Shiism.
8
This local rendition of the ideal can be read through the framework of collective
memory that as Maurice Halbwachs describes exists both within the present of its
enactment as well as outside time. For collective memory is located outside time as a
cognitive relation between ideas and propositions about behaviour, individual, society and
religion. It is at the same time situated in the present in relation to processes of historical
and cultural traditions of embedding groups and individuals in specific contexts. Leading
from this Halbwachs argues that collective memory is by nature multiple yet specific,
collective, plural, and yet individual for there are as many social memories possible as
there are groups (Halbwachs 1992).

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The original shedding of blood is re-enacted in spectacular displays

of flagellation where instruments like chains, knives, sharp blades are
used to shed blood from ones own chest, back, head and forehead.
The procession of public flagellation is known as tatbir in Arabic,
qama-zani in Persian and zanjeer matham in Urdu. The drawing of
blood from ones own body is at one level an enactment of the original
shedding of the martyrs blood. At another level, drawing blood is a
ritual invocation and a symbolic performance of the perceived perse-
cution by the majorityblood forming the consanguineous link to the
original moment by ritually renewing the spiritual connection between
the commemorator and the Imam.
The inaugural loss then acts as not just the origins of Shia resistance
against evil, but as the paradigmatic instance of this resistance, understood
as an ever-repeating type of event (Deeb 2007). This is not about a return
to Karbala, but rather using Karbala as a parallel to emphasise the morality
of ones stance, as an identification with the side of good (Deeb 2007: 18).
The eternal battle against evil or injustice complicates a linear narrative
structure, because it employs mnemonic devices that catapult across modern
time (Beeman 1993; Deeb 2007). This is possible through objects, narration
and performance that recast the present in terms of the original moment,
oblivious in some sense to the movement of historical time.
At the same time, the second episode after the original moment, namely
the Iranian Revolution of 1979, re-ordered the Karbala paradigm as part
of historical time. The memory of the inaugural loss is adopted as part of
a transcendental reason that shifts Karbala from a parable or a morality
tale to universal principles, such as rebellion against political oppression
or values of creating an equal society. In locating the ritual remembrance
of the inaugural loss as part of a progressive historical time that is empty
and homogeneous, this mode of commemoration marks a significant shift
from a quietist model.
The emphasis of the quietist model, in contrast, is on inner truth, the
invisible (ghaib), philosophy of dissimulation (taqiyya) that allows con-
cealing ritual differences for common goals. Here time is agential and the
individual subservient to its flux. The memory of the inaugural loss reminds
the commemorator of the declining nature of time after the Prophet, under
which the individual harnesses both internal (taqiyya) and invisible (ghaib)
faith by ritually renewing affective bonds with the original moment, thereby
withdrawing from active public life, until the circumstances change.

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In contrast, the Universalist model of time sees the individual as agential

and time as empty, where Karbala acts as a revolutionary paradigm and a
mnemonic of insurrection (Hegland 1983, 1998a). Here time is progres-
sive and not depreciatory in nature; where the memory of Karbala serves
as a paradigm for self-reflexivity and political awareness in consciously
challenging the oppressive political and religious majority.
The different temporalities of decline, as I seek to demonstrate through
my ethnography, alter between first seeing the contemporary as in a state
of decline that is experienced as deteriorating in nature since the time of
the Prophet.9 The inaugural loss at Karbala here testifies to the fall in the
nature of time that takes the entire Muslim community closer to the Day
of Judgment. The experience of decline, second, sees the present as
diachronic and seeks to remake it by returning to an authentic Islamic past.
This progressive interpretation of time takes the memory of Karbala as a
ground for reflexive engagement to remake the community through educa-
tion, technology and mass media towards a reformed ritualism. The Shias
of Hyderabad old city articulate both strains. They describe their present
as being in a state of decline by talking about moral decadency, concealed
divinity and polluted rivers that tell of the deprivations of time as well as
implicate Muslim actors in their practice of Islam as offenders in time.
In doing so, the memory of the inaugural loss is part of both history and
tradition, past and present, dissolving social science categories that reify
these differences.10 The next section explores these temporal tensions that
emerged in the ethnography among Shias of Hyderabad old city, in order
to conceptually think about decline within the sociology of time.

9
Veena Das in a recent article describes moral failure in everyday life and its trance-like
qualities, by exploring Muslim self-perceptions of collective weakness of their community
in proximity with the Hindu other as shaping notions of moral perfectionism. The sense
of moral burden, Das argues, is about the particular experience of time in which Muslims
experience the present as decline and as a result of their creation, imbuing in themselves
a moral disquiet. This is different from the Hindu experience of moral decline, which
she reads as a kind of natural history of morality embedded in the nature of time itself,
characterised by the understanding of the contemporary as kaliyuga as the age of moral
decline (Das2010). However, my ethnography differs from making distinctions regarding
the particular experience of time as differing in relation to distinct communities and their
everyday theologies, showing, in fact, that ideas of the natural movement of time as opposed
to a progressive movement of time differ as varied theologies within a single community.
10
In anthropology, for instance, the construction of historical calendrical time is posited
as the time of progress that is antithetical to the cyclical and static time of tradition. Clifford
Geertz, for instance, argues for two kinds of time in the context of the Balinese: ritualised time

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IV
Ethnography of decline
Decline of dargahs

In the oldest dargah of Hyderabad old city, called Hazrath Abbas ki

dargah,11 I met Syeda, its woman trustee and caretaker (mutawalli). The
dargah was located in the precincts of the palace of the prominent Shia
Prime Minister of the city, Mir Turab Ali Khan or the Salar Jung. The
palace area, known as Dewan Deodi (the palace of the prime minister),
was demolished 30 years ago, leaving behind the dargah that today is part
of the commercial establishments and shops around Charminar.
During an unexpected visit to the dargah in 2011 external to the
Muharram months, when less ritual activity could be expected, I was
surprised at the number of visitors. It was evening, a time when the new
day begins following the rise of the moon. Being the eve of holy Friday
(shab-e-Jumma), the time was marked for congregation. A gathering
spontaneously convened reciting supplicants (duas) and ritually offered

that takes place in a motionless present without duration and a second non-ritual mundane
time that is concerned with pragmatic activities, such as agriculture and politics in which
duration is universally recognised (Geertz (1966) 1973). In making this division between ritual
and mundane time, Geertz furthers a Malinowskian conception of culture, as rule-governed
and homogeneous, that socially transmits cognition by perpetuating itself through public
expression of an ideological past. This theory was based on a structuralist social cognition
of rules, transmitted from one generation to another, according to which different cultures
operate with different systems of thought and experiences of time. This idea of ritual time was
socially derived as culturally variable in different cultures and societiesand challenged by
Maurice Bloch, for instance, who drew on ideas from Wittgensteins zoology to argue that if
anthropologists were to understand another culture and make sense of ritual time they must
at a fundamental level apprehend time in the same way (Bloch 1977: 283). Bloch critiques
the idea of cultural time by questioning the social determination of cognition and its emphasis
on the reproduction of a social system as failing to explain how change and conflict takes place
within ritual culture. It does not explain, for instance, why peasant conflict occurs if all actors
are located within the social. For this leaves actors with no language to talk about society
since they can only talk within it (ibid.). In response, Bloch concludes that social change can
occur because the pragmatic past acts as a different conceptual sources for challenging the
ritualised, static past. In doing so, Bloch creates inter-linkages between pragmatic and ritual
past, seeing the two as distinct but as deriving from the other allowing for debate, revision
and contestations within ritual time (Appadurai 1981).
11
The dargah is also called badi bargah or the big court complex, perhaps referring to
bigger fields it was once part of.

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food to the standard (nazr) that symbolically represented the martyr-saints

of Karbala. The complex acted as a space of healing, transformation and
hope by facilitating visitors to ritually mourn, weep, enact their predica-
ments and seek mediation in resolving afflictions.
What remained of the dargah was a one-room chamber, despite the
large numbers of visitors, where the sound of traffic drowned all echoes
of piety. It consisted of an extension of living quarters, with a bedroom
adjacent to the main hall and a courtyard for male visitors who waited
their turn for visitations to the standards.
Syeda, the eighth head (mutawalli) and caretaker of the dargah was in her
60s. She was seated next to the standards, her hair in a high bun, holding a
betel nut cutter (sarota), while chopping the betel nut into small pieces being
collected into a silver betel box (paandan) that lay next to her. In the same hall,
as women visitors performed their ritual service, children chased a white cat
around the standards. As we talked, Syeda effortlessly switched roles, admon-
ishing children, listening to complaints of physical ailments and depression,
prescribing ritual cures as well as reminiscing about the dargah.
She told me the extraordinary story of one of the oldest dargahs of the
old city. Her forefathers, Noor-ul-Huda and Mir Miran, were ministers
(wazir) in the Safavid court in Iran and got involved in a rebellion
(bagawat) against the king. Sensing danger to their life, they fled and went
underground (poshida) by the banks of River Euphrates, in present-day
Iraq.12 While in hiding, they heard of the Shia kingdoms in the Deccan
and travelled on a horse to the kingdom of Golconda, during the time of
Mohammad Quli when Hyderabad city was being built. At Golconda,
the Imam appeared in a dream (besharath)13 telling them that they have

12
The river Euphrates has a mystical place in the Islamic cosmology, being the site where
the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet Imam Hussain took place in 680 ad.
13
Dreams hold a special significance in establishing the efficacy of objects and spaces. The
appearance of the martyrs of Karbala in a dream acts as divine communication, in response to
which the person discovers ritual objects in a foretold spot that establishes an efficacy around
the object and the location. Katherine Ewing describes dreams in the context of Muslim
Pakistan as spiritual initiation to resolve conflicts, constituting social realities in particular
cultures. Unlike Freuds emphasis on the latent meaning of dreams as significations of a
persons past, she argues, dreams manifest and replicate a cultural template. This for Ewing
expresses a semiotic model of the self, an ongoing experience of the self of which a person
is only unconsciously aware and whose reflections converts dreams into self-representation
that holds possibilities for future transformation (Ewing 1997). For more on dreaming
in Islamic traditions, see Green (2003), Taneja (2012) and Zaman (2015).

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 Shias of Hyderabad old city /15

reached their rightful destination and promised them a high moral station
(muqam) that can be surpassed by no king. To attain this, it was prophesised
that her forefathers should return to the Euphrates, perform acts of piety
till they are able to feel the fragrance of the river when divine knowledge
will be bestowed to them.
For more than five years they returned to live near the Euphrates in states
of moral cleanliness (ghusl), till they received sacred offering (tabarruk) of
three relics from the battle of Karbalaa piece of the original armour of
Imam Abbas, a piece of Imam Qasims original spear and a part of Imam
Hussains headgear in the shape of a moon and a star. These spiritual
offerings were brought to Golconda. The Imam in the dream foretold of
a place with flowing water and banyan trees as the site to institute the
relics. Syedas forefathers walked the forest around Golconda looking for
a sign, as prophesied by the Imam. At a distance from Golconda they were
struck by the sight of flowing water (chashma). Her forefathers then saw
a large banyan tree near the river, installed the relics and thus the famous
dargah came into being at a distance from the River Musi.
The dargah was known to heal and protect the inhabitants of the city,
irrespective of religion, caste or age. For this honour, Syedas ancestors
received royal recognition by the Qutub Shahis and were endowed with
land (jagir) around the dargah, drum and pipe (naubat), royal standard
(mahimaratib) as well as a royal umbrella. The area of Dewan Deodi
where you stand today once belonged to us, since a time when this area
was a jungle covered in thick canopy of banyan trees, Syeda lamented.
Gradually, the family lost the landsome appropriated by the Salar
Jung family, some squandered and some seized by the Indian government
after the forced accession of the princely state of Hyderabad to the newly
independent Indian territories. The family filed cases in the court contesting
their claims to the property and Syeda dismissed these attempts in their
capacity to yield returns, with a remark that much money and time has
been lost by her family. Instead, she dwelled on a curse that she believed
inflicted her family for the past eight generations, where the birth of boy
child leads to the death of the father, annihilating the possibility of a male
heir. Syeda herself was unable to conceive, combining her loss with the
loss of dargah land in an abortive line of descent.
The lineage of depreciation included the loss of value for an ecology of
healingwhere standards, holy water, prayers, prophesy and dreams are no
longer regarded as actual instruments of healing and cure. She referred to,

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what can be termed the decline of a ritual ecology of healing, alluding to an

urban decay where traffic, congestion, vanished lakes and a dried riverbed,
replaced banyan trees and its thick canopy of leaves that once ameliorated
the afflicted who visited the dargah.14 Nor does water flow anymore, she
said, leaving behind sludge to restore wounds and distress.15
Even while Syeda lamented the shrinking of dargah land, she was
striving at the time to make her foray into electoral politics and stood
for elections as a candidate of the breakaway party, the Majlis Bachao
Tehreek (MBT; translation: Save Majlis Movement) from the Sunni All
India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM). She stood against the local
AIMIM candidate from her constituency and lost.

Declining feudal networks

Similar to Syedas loss of dargah land and the weakening value of ritual
healing, other Shias I met described a loss of support systems when
feudal networks collapsed after the downfall of the Shia elite. Since the
application of the Jagirdari Abolition Regulation in 1949 in particular,
landowning families lost the income they received from their landholdings
(jagir). The family of Nawab Hashim Nawaz Jung Bahadur, like many
nawabs of Hyderabad at the time, was left with depleted estates without

14
In a recent introduction on corruption, Naveeda Khan (2015) explores the experience
of corruption as emblematic of civilisational decline or social decay. Drawing from
Stanley Cavells reading of Spengler and Wittgenstein, she reflects on the rise and decline
of cultures as being placed less in history in the sense of human/world history and more
natural history as biological/organic. In doing so, she makes a case for culture as living
in a temporal world that is involved in the common destiny of mortality (1988: 41).
The argument is made from the perspective of the everyday, its residual marks on bodies
and moral imagination, from which perceptions of corruption are seen as inflected by the
biological life course of humans and the perceived mortality of cultures and civilisations
rendered as physical objects prone to decay within the landscape of history. This move of
placing culture within the natural world, away from the social determination of culture,
shifts the debate on society and culture as processes embedded in neither historical time
of continual change nor of fixed structure of timeless social perpetuation. Culture then is
seen as ontologically contiguous with the larger environment that takes a natural course
of growth, decline, death and maybe even rebirth.
15
Following this argument, one could think of cultures, as Bhrighupati Singh suggests,
as waxing and waning through relations of force and contract at varying thresholds of life
(Singh 2015: 55). Singh has shown that cultures mature and decline like life, guided by a
combination of relations of force and contract, both political and mythological in nature.

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 Shias of Hyderabad old city /17

the necessary resources to manage their property. Alongside, their feudal

lands were taken over by the Indian state leading them to bankruptcy.
People who worked as domestic helpers in these estates, like Fatima, also
expressed deep attachments to what can otherwise be seen as exploitative
feudal structures. Fatima, her five sisters, and brother once lived and worked
in the estates of Nawab Hashim Nawaz Jung Bahadur, the commander-
in-chief of the army of the sixth Nizam, Mehboob Ali Pasha. Even today
when they sit together for their evening cup of tea, the conversation strays
to remembering the estates of the Nawab where they spent their childhood
and they speak nostalgically about the past when the Shia nobility exercised
economic and political influence. They referred to the estate as the badha
bagh (big orchards) and reminisced about the days when they could eat
fruits off trees, as much as they liked, and still be left with more. The orchard
was sold to complete strangers for pittance, they complained.
To them, the estates of the nawabs were associated with their childhood
of living in the orchard around fruit-bearing trees. Being part of a feudal
infrastructure meant receiving routinely new clothes on Eid, three meals
at designated times and perhaps even cast-off clothes they cherished.
They endlessly discussed stories of intrigue involving capricious relatives,
greedy inheritors and powerless figureheads that most in the area were
well awareof. As respectable women, they were not part of a wage labour
economy, instead were part of a social network where they made a living
by reciting laments and being part of an informal economy of ritualism that
gave them visibility, status as well as frequent access to the inner workings
of spaces of healing and transformation that dargahs represent.

Moral decline

The above narratives of decline contrasted with a discourse of moral

degeneration also articulated within Hyderabad old city that placed the
burden of loss on ways Shias commemorate Karbala. This was articulated
by a group of young Muslim activists from the old city who critiqued what
they called the old city culture of patronage and decadence. During the
ritual period of Muharram in 2008 and 2011, I encountered a dynamic
discourse on the need to reform ritual practices that were seen as part of
old city culture.
It was the Muharram of 2008 when I met an activist group called
Tanzeem, a registered youth organisation of professionals who had put up

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a stall for the first time during Muharram. This was part of the cityscape
when stalls lined the roads of the old city to serve water, play sermons
and laments on loudspeakers as part of the two months of commemorat-
ing the battle of Karbala. Unlike the interaction in traditional stalls that
mediate tradition, by distributing cups of water, play eulogies or distribute
pamphlets with schedules of gatherings (majlis), the Tanzeem stall me-
diated tradition through CDs, DVDs, films and T-shirts with a message
Muharram against terrorism. They sold sermons by Shia preachers from
Pakistan trained in Iran, on CDs and DVDs. They also circulated pamphlets
on Shiism, focusing particularly on Shia politics in the Middle East.
They sought to adopt a model of intervention that they believed would
strengthen the community from within, both in matters of faith (deen) and
secular education (duniya). Tanzeem also ran a coaching centre, where
members career-counselled and coached Shia students from economically
disadvantaged contexts, particularly from Hyderabads old city where a
substantial population of the Shia urban poor reside. In addition, Tanzeem
organised forums for public discussion and debate, including an Islamic quiz
through mobile phones, which entailed a prize for the first right SMS.
Through conversations with them, I found that Tanzeem was a move-
ment that began through an Islamic self-study circle they refer to as QSC
(Quran study circles). The group was started by Twelver (a sect of Shiism
based on the path of succession of the Imams) Shia clerics trained in the
hawza (university for learning in Islamic sciences) in Qom (Iran), with
a vision to re-think the local Shia community in the old city. This model
of self-engagement with the holy texts was the basis for this reformist
imagination. The imagination was derived from a larger Islamic reformist
ethos of self-study, which involved an engagement with Islam to establish
the true and correct understanding of traditional beliefs and practices,
that Eickelman and Piscatori have termed objectification (Eickelman
1992: 643), and which Lara Deeb has also termed as a process of seek-
ing authentication in Islamic ritual practices (Deeb 2006: 8). Tanzeem,
publicly circulated images of a global Shia imagery that broadly espoused
a shift from praxis (practice) or orthopraxy towards logos (reason) or
orthodoxy, by calling into being a reflexive consciousness in engaging
with questions like What is my religion, Why is it important to my life
and How do my beliefs guide my conduct (Eickelman and Piscatori
2004). QSC forums were hence a platform to engage with religion under
supervision of those formally trained. It sought an underlying reason and

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 Shias of Hyderabad old city /19

purpose (maqsad) for the performance of Islamic rituals. The performance

of rituals was sought to be re-fashioned towards political awareness and
emancipation by rooting rituals in the Karbala paradigm as the original
moment of political awakening and reflexivity, where human agency and
political rebellion was sought to oppose the ruling majority, as displayed
during the Iranian revolution in 1979.
The activists at the stall talked about a need for change from historically
embedded traditional structures of patronage and feudalism that they saw
as moral decadence that engulfed the old city. Ali, one of the activists,
remarked: we are an utterly degenerate society. The urban poverty in
the old city was meant to be illustrative of this. According to Ali, Murtuza
Nagar in Yaqutpura in the old city, an area populated with mosques and
dargahs was declared the biggest slum of the city.
The Tanzeem activists attributed this moral and material decay of the
old city to the colonial disciplining of religion that they saw as confining
Islamic tradition to the private sphere, which according to them reduced
Islam to empty ritualism, display of emotions as well as rites of marriage,
death, divorce and other domains within the purview of the personal law,
divorcing it from any political potential. Another Tanzeem activist added
that it was the lack of religious learning, scholarship and ignorance pro-
moted by the Muslim religious leaders who use religion for profit that has
resulted in depths of darkness and ignorance of the old city. In seeking
reform, the Tanzeem activists advocated change from patronage to
self-reliance as a collective strategy of modernisation and survival.
Through the use of technology, the activists sought to fashion a modern
Shia self, by re-thinking the local in terms of the global. In the numerous
pamphlets published by Tanzeem and the posters displayed in their stall,
the most repeated textual references and quotes were from the Iranian
spiritual head Ayatollah Khamenei, referred to as the Rahbar-i-Muslimeen
(leader of Muslims), Iraqi marja Ayatollah Sistani, referred to as the Marja-
i-Taqleed (source of authority to follow), and the Lebanese Sayyid Hasan
Nasrallah, referred to as the Sayyid-ul-Maqawamat (guide to the spiritual
station). Videos of live recordings of sermons included those by Pakistani
preachers trained in Iran, on topics such as anti-Bush or anti-imperialism
as attempts to forge a collective Shia identity. The Internet was used for
screening sermons and autobiographies of Hezbollah martyrs. As activ-
ists, Tanzeem emphasised that what was needed in Hyderabad was not
a Hezbollah but rather a collective change in the local Shia community,

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a change from traditional structures of patronage. They deployed media

technology to effect movement towards self-reliance.
A sermon played by Tanzeem in their stall caught my attention. The
sermon was projected on a screen in their stall and was delivered by a
well-known Pakistani preacher (ulema) trained in Iran. It addressed the
crucial debate on flagellation by sharp instruments as an appropriate
mode of commemorating the battle of Karbala known as the qama-zani
controversy. The controversy was prompted by the issue of a fatwa
(an opinion by an expert) by Khamenei the spiritual leader of Iran on
7 Muharram 1994. This controversy led to interrogating the basic ritual
premise constituting the Shia community, which debated the problem
of representing the community in Muharram processions. Khameneis
fatwa declared public self-flagellation, using sharp weapons, such as a
knife (qam) or chains (zanjeer) to shed blood as unlawful and forbidden,
prohibiting qama-zani as an institution of superstition and unsupported
ritualism. The fatwa became immensely controversial within a certain
section of Shia society in South Asia (Hegland 1998b; Pinault 1999),
with the adherents of qama-zani publicly contradicting this fatwa with
the justification that their practice is a public expression of tradition and
community identity.
It was publicly debated for the first time in Hyderabad in 2008, be-
cause the Tanzeem stalls ought to re-introduce the debate through posters,
pamphlets and sermons. The sermon was projected in the stall, and its
audience, composed mostly of young boys from the old city, was seated
on the carpet on the roadside:

Please reflect every Islamic ritual has a reason (maqsad), a philosophy

(falsafa), history (tariq), the sermon beseeched its audience. What is
the purpose of flagellation with chains (zanjeer matham)? It was so
that Hussains love will be born in peoples heart, the love for the op-
pressed (mazloom) and hatred for oppression (zulm). Isnt this Islam,
the love for the oppressed (mazloom) and hatred for oppression (zulm)?
Through processions this message of Islam spread. A chain is never
hit in a closed room, isnt it? There is no philosophy (falsafa) of the
closed room. Chains (zanjeer) are hit in a city, like in Karachi, in the
absolute centre (chowk), in downtowns. What is the reason (maqsad)
for this? When a group of, say five to ten people hit chains (zanjeer)
together, spectators stand around and watch this. Why? It is because

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when chain (zanjeer) is hit, a media is created in which people gather

and when people gather it is time to give our message. Earlier there
was no media, there was no television and in order to create a media,
thousands of Shias gathered so that they could spread the message
of Islam from their hearts that there should be love for the oppressed
(mazloom) and hatred for oppression (zulm).

The sermon placed ritual performance within progressive and historical

time,16 arguing that ritual performance has an underlying reason and a
philosophy, which in the case of Karbala is the creation of a just society.
This philosophy of justice is seen as based on the principle of love for the

16
This continuity between history, memory and ritual performance does not presume
them as fundamentally opposed domains. This is different in ways history and memory
are understood, by Pierre Nora, for instance, where memory is emotional, spontaneous,
unselfconscious and provides an organic link between the present and traditions of the
past. History, on the other hand, is narrow, intellectual, linear and causal, and considers
the present to be disconnected from the past by the force of historical change. History,
then, according to Nora, works at the plane of representation (Nora 1989). It is intellectual,
authoritative and absolutist. Memory, on the other hand, is in the realm of tradition, in
concrete gestures and spaces of the everyday and is most importantly affective and
magical. These boundaries are blurred in modern societies, he argues, in sites such as
national rituals, state memorials and public symbols like the flag as having replaced sites
of memory in which living memory once existed. This living memory, which once lived
in the warmth of tradition and the silence of custom is eradicated and annihilated,
he bemoans, in the acceleration of history that provides an authoritative version of the
past. While Ashis Nandy counters Noras differentiation between history and memory,
by looking at the multitudes living outside history in that they have living theories of
the past that is important and shapes their present and future, in myths and folk tales
but is different from the historical consciousness of historians. For Nandy, historical
consciousness is inextricably associated with the project of conquest, the nation-state, its
secular worldviews and scientific rationality. The major difference between those living
in history and those living outside it, he argues, is in myths which are morality tales that
predominantly organise experiences of the past through, what he calls the principle of
principled forgetfulness (Nandy 1995: 47). For Nandy, the two, history and memory,
are incompatible, since historical consciousness cannot take morality and forgetfulness
seriously due to its foundational empiricism. Therefore, any attempt to bring the two in
conversation, that is, the mythological in contact with the historical, is destructive because
once you own history, it begins to own you (ibid.: 45). What one sees here, in ways the
memory of the inaugural loss is read as part of historical rationality, not just dissolves
differences between history and memory but opens up the possibility of recovering tradition
and infusing temporal coherence within ritualism as primitive non-rational action.

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oppressed (mazloom) and hatred for oppression (zulm). In linking ritual

performance with universal principles, the sermon explained the context
for the development of practices of flagellation (qama-zani) as a develop-
ment that deviates from the path of transcendental reason. In the absence
of mass media, it argued, ritual practices like qama-zani, fire-walking
and fire-eating were a form of ritual theatre that served the purpose of a
transcendental truth, that is, love for the oppressed (mazloom) and hatred
for oppression (zulm). However, it claimed:

If in England flagellating with chains on the road in the presence of

a white person (gora) attracts them to Islam then necessarily this act
should be continued, since the primary purpose is to tell people of
Islams message. But today people are becoming enemies of Islam and
enemies of Shias. They show flagellations in the media and say look at
these Shias taking out blood from their own bodies, they are terrorists,
they are animals (vaishi), they come from the jungles. If this is causing
propaganda against us then we should propagate in a different method.

Linking ritual with a transcendental reason, the sermon saw the practices
of self-flagellation as deviating from this purpose. The reason for this, it
provided, is the changed political context, where Islam is associated with
violence since the declaration of the war on terror on the Muslim world,
making people enemies of Islam and enemies of the Shias. Given the
present state of political failing, the sermon pleaded for a reform of ritual-
ism that deploys reason as a method of propagation.

Today, more than ever, this is very important, for today Islam is weak
and today Muslims are weak. You see, all acts of worship have a
purpose, and the purpose of these acts is the unity of Muslims. Why
do we read namaz? Because its purpose is unity; collective namaz has
multiple blessings. What is the purpose of fasting (roza)? It is unity.
What is the purpose of hajj? That Muslims unite. Beyond unity there
is nothing. Even today if we take Hussains name and unite, surely we
can become superpowers in the world.

The sermon invoked the decline of Islamic civilisations as well as of

the Muslim community as a historical development that can be altered by
returning the Muslim community to the memory of the inaugural loss.

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 Shias of Hyderabad old city /23

This return is made possible by enacting ritual acts such as prayer, fasting
and the payment of Islamic tax as part of manifestations of the transcen-
dental reason, that is, justice and love for the oppressed (mazloom) and
hatred for oppression (zulm). In doing so, the sermon recalled the original
loss as a paradigm of justice that the Tanzeem activist would argue returns
the political to the religious, revoking discourses of the colonial state that
sought to delimit a formal sphere of politics by purporting a separation
of a religiously informed domestic sphere as well as a secular colonial
domain (Jalal 2000: 37).
The sermon generated much opposition that year. The Tanzeem stall
was vandalised, posters of Khamenei were torn and the activists were
arrested. However, the public engagement with the debate around the
practice of qama-zani unbridled counter reasons in support of the practice.
Counter reasons supporting qama-zani bordered on community self-
expression and love for the Imams. Paradoxically, those who supported
qama-zani also drew upon loss and the decline of Muslim civilisations, for
they viewed Tanzeems moves to curb qama-zani as the prototype of fitna
or a time of oppression that characterised the period after the Prophets
death. They also viewed Islam as under siege and Muslims all over as
weak, as characterised by the time of oppression or fitna and argued that
flagellating as a means of expressing love and support for the martyrs
needs to be upheld and valourised as a struggle for self and community
expression within this time. The defenders of qama-zani perceived moral
loss as a natural sequence of time after the Propheta time characterised
by disquietude and oppression that is illustrated by efforts to curtail the
expression of love for the family of the Prophet.

V
Conclusion
Bruno Latour reminds us that the preoccupation with tradition and
the interpretation of tradition as an age-old ritual is a distinctly modern
tendency, born out of the anxiety about the vanishing past (Latour 1993).
Communities on the margins of modernity can be seen to emphasise and
display their tradition through what Bourdieu calls the excesses of symbolic
capital in performing their identity as practices that preserve their agency
(Bourdieu 1986). The agency of the colonised modern subject, through
community memory, is sought to be recovered by reworking tradition,

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making it possible to look for reasons of failure of the historical within

the traditional. This is not necessarily about the past, but is prospective in
its retrospective perspective. It imagines possible futures and unrealised
possibilities in the past that have become obsolete in visioning the future.
It returns to the present, the belief in a pristine world that is seen to be lost
with modernity, by forgotten people engaged in obsolete labours and living
in ruined spaces when shifts of capital re-signify and dispossess.
The case of the Shias of Hyderabad who experience the present as a
moment of decline can be seen as part of the loss of political dominance
with colonial modernity. They return to the memory of the inaugural loss
in order to remake the future, as responses to the loss of political power,
sense of alienation and withdrawal from postcolonial politics. Yet, the
experience of decline is linked to obvious fissures within the community,
where an upper caste elite status no longer holds, due to depleted economic
and political dominance within a colonial and postcolonial milieu. In
this context, temporal meanings are sought to be forged, where agential
time that is seen as in natural decline and synchronically deteriorating, is
re-made into empty, homogeneous and progressive that places the indi-
vidual as the central agent in remaking the community. This is doneby
re-establishing connections between ritual, memory and history, made
possible after the Islamic revolution of 1979, when decline within the con-
temporary is encountered by returning to the memory of the inaugural loss
and re-embedding ritual practices that commemorate the inaugural loss as
part of progressive time that links it with universal reason. Sections within
the community oppose such a reading, with the firm belief that efforts to
embed ritual within the historical, destroys affective connections.17

17
It is possible here to think of time as constituted by both history and tradition. I have
in mind what Dipesh Chakrabarty, describes as part of the difficulties of writing a secular
history, where modern historical consciousness takes into account a notion of time in
which Gods, spirits, or the supernatural have agency in the world (Chakrabarty 1997: 35).
Chakrabarty explores this contradiction in the Marxist category of commodity through the
problem of temporality, where a bifurcation is made possible within the category of labour
itselfbetween real labour as belonging to the world of heterogeneity and its multiple
temporalities of transcendental time or non-durational time as well as abstract labour as
a general labour category that imposes homogeneity on abstract individuals. Through the
Derridean notion of trace as that which cannot be enclosed and that which challenges capital,
Chakravarty concludes that capital exists with the residual. He, therefore, sees within capital
the temporally multiple, through which possibilities of reading history and memory as a
continuum can be opened.

Contributions to Indian Sociology 51, 2 (2017): 128

 Shias of Hyderabad old city /25

Both these expressions of decline critique modernity, being at the

same time products of it. Bemoaning the past, claiming authenticity and
reviving tradition can be seen as colonially mediated modern forms of
community expressions that develop apace with globalisation in response
to a sense of loss and displacement it brings with it (Giles-Vernick 2000;
Hann 1998; Skaria 1999; Strathern 1999).
An ethnography of decline, therefore, becomes relevant to studies on the
effects of colonialism and urban development, since it retains the potential
to re-think modern time as part of an inherent temporality of progress, de-
velopment and future-driven track. From this perspective, claims of a return
to the golden age or to pristine tradition are not seen as spurious but as part
of the modern predicament that are neither restorative nor conservatory in
their purpose, but generative of the political in newer ways.

Acknowledgements
This article is part of my doctoral dissertation submitted to the School of Oriental and African
Studies, Department of Anthropology and Sociology. It was written as part of the Visiting
Research Fellowship at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and Berlin Graduate School
Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS). The Charles Wallace India Trust, Haimendorf
Fellowship, Central Research Fund, SOAS Postgraduate Additional Fieldwork Award, as
well as the Indian Council of Social Science Research fellowship funded the research. I am
truly indebted to my supervisors, Stephen Hughes and Edward Simpson, for their contribution
to the research. I am also grateful to Magnus Marsden, Mukulika Banerjee, Faisal Devji,
Daud Ali and Caroline Osella for their intellectual generosity and critical commentary on
the research. Thank you to the faculty and colleagues at Centre for the Study of Culture and
Society as well as Sarai-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies for offering me the
independent fellowship to begin work on Muharram in Hyderabad. My gratitude to Lawrence
Liang, Shail Mayaram, Deepak Mehta, Mushirul Hasan, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Naveen
Thayyil, who has partnered and helped me navigate my way through a complex terrain.
I thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers at the Contributions to Indian Sociology
for their insightful reading of the article, useful correctives and editorial help. I would like
to dedicate this article to my informants and my entire family in Hyderabad, particularly
my grandmother who lived her losses as virtues.

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