Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India
Kelly
Pemberton
ABOUT THE BOOK
Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data
with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women’s participation in
the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation
both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood.
Kelly Pemberton grounds her firsthand research into India’s Sufi shrines and
saints by setting her observations against the historical backdrop of
colonist-era discourses by British civil servants. Orientalist scholars, and
Muslim reformists and the assumptive portrayals of women’s activities in the
milieu of Sufi orders and shrines inherent in these accounts. These early
narratives, Pemberton holds, are driven by social, economic, intellectual, and
political undercurrents of self-interest that shaped Western understanding of
Indian Muslims and, in particular, of women’s participation in the institutions
of Sufism.
Pemberton’s research offers a corrective by
assessing the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recongnized
as a spiritual authority or guide—despite official denial of such status—and by
examining the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot
perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women
doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of
master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be
recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton
explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual meditation carried out
by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she
maps shifting ideas about women’s involvement in public ritual events in a
variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also
highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by
poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often
perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate
outside the public sphere of major shrines.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kelly Pemberton is an Assistant Professor of Religion
and Women’s Studies at George Washington University and coeditor of Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the
Articulation of Identities in South Asia. Her articles have appeared in the
Journal of Ritual Studies, Muslim World,
the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic
Cultures, and other publications.
Dy. 261pp. with 6 b/w illustrations
& 2 figures. (hb). 2015.
ISBN 978-81-215-1285-5. Rs 895.
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