CSAS Lecture Series | Everyday Futurism: Being towards Belonging in Sufi Tomb Shrines

Attend via Zoom: https://myumi.ch/PkMMz

In the middle of Bangalore, a relatively small dargah (Sufi tomb shrine) is a space of possibility for multiple marginalized groups, facilitating imagined futures that include Muslims, subaltern Hindus, Dalits, and hijras as full citizens of the Indian polity. At a time when powerful political actors seek to limit national belonging to a particular segment of Hindu Indians, such spaces and the people who intersect through them are not simply places of resistance but places where possible futures are grounded in the ethics of the past. Exploring the histories, objects, and rituals that intersect through an intentionally multireligious place illuminates the spectacular and mundane ways in which minoritized communities make space for themselves in an India where majoritarian religious nationalism is ascendant but hitherto incomplete.

Anna Bigelow is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, as well as Faculty Director of the Center for South Asia, at Stanford University. Bigelow's current book project is a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey, exploring how everyday devotional life in shared spaces illuminates the shifting terrain of these ambivalently secular states. Another project traces the lives of devotional objects circulated by Muslims, Hindus, and others around a Sufi tomb shrine in India. She is the editor and contributor to a volume on material objects in Islamic cultures, Islam through Objects (Bloomsbury, 2021). Bigelow's earlier work Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community.

Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.