Anna Bigelow's important study of Malerkotla, a Muslim-majority town in Hindu-dominated Punjab, uses the fifteenth-century Sufi saint Haider Shaykh's tomb shrine as a “window” (7) into the workings of convivial inter-religious interactions. Sharing the Sacred provides a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of how the social and historical context of this particular shared shrine is refracted in inter-communal interactions within the precincts of the holy place. Her study, segueing between descriptions of practices within the shrine, recountings of town and regional histories, and vignettes of contemporary interactions between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains, demonstrates the “daily work of community maintenance” (122) involved in perpetuating a haven of inter-communal conviviality in the midst of a region deeply incised within historical memory by ethnic cleansing and population displacements.

Six years before the Partition of 1947, the Punjab population was 53 percent Muslim, 31 percent Hindu, and a 15 percent Sikh; by 2001 Muslims made up 1.5 percent of the state, Hindus 36.8 percent, and Sikhs 59.9 percent. Malerkotla has resisted the regional trend, maintaining a demographic since pre-Partition of 70 percent Muslim, 21 percent Hindu, and smaller numbers of Sikhs (5–8 percent), Jains, and Christians. Bigelow's study seeks to explain this anomaly, and offers a theoretically sophisticated counterpoint to studies of those sites of endemic inter-communal conflict that fuel the arguments of advocates of “the clash of civilizations.” She analyses a setting in which conflictual events, rather than triggering widespread violence through well-established channels of communication, are instead “managed” through “self-policing on the part of the various religious communities” (224). In Malerkotla, such events serve as “peace triggers, mobilizing local leaders, government officials, neighborhoods, friends and enemies to counteract the conflict, setting the institutionalized peace system into motion” (243).

“Malerkotla is not a utopia” (3), and Bigelow is not a naïve advocate of a humane perspective on human nature. Sharing the Sacred demonstrates not only the intense “work” of producing and maintaining good inter-communal relations within the shrine precincts and the surrounding town, but also the way Malerkotla's history, and its telling and retelling by its inhabitants, has “cultivated” (245) shared spaces. The materiality of the shrine and the character of practices carried out within it (marked by the “absence of a highly structured ritual process” [190]) are set out in detail in chapter five, illustrating the shrine's ability to provide generalized rather than sect-specific blessings. In preceding chapters Bigelow examines the history of the legendry of Hayder Shaykh (chapter 1), the activities of the hereditary Muslim ruling family of the princely state of Malerkotla from its founding in 1454 to its effective dissolution with Independence (chapter 2), the pre-Partition history of the town (chapter 3), and its experience during and after Partition (chapter 4). These histories, and their variant shapings and retellings by different constituencies, demonstrate a “semantic multivocality” (27) that helps explain the site's appeal to worshippers of different confessions.

With Partition, Malerkotla found itself a Muslim-majority enclave within a Punjab denuded of its Muslim population. Bigelow suggests that this situation might provide an explanation for Malerkotla's cultivated tolerance: “as a Muslim majority town, in a Sikh majority state, in a Hindu majority nation, no group is able to establish dominance. All religious groups are in some regard vulnerable and cognizant that their well being depends on their positive relations with others” (10). This explanation of communal harmony as a consequence of a balance of potentially antagonistic forces concurs with Robert Hayden's conception of “antagonistic tolerance” but fails to jibe with the “vibrant community life in the streets and homes and shrines of a locale” (223).

Both within the dargah and its surroundings, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains engage in intricately involved patterns of mutual dependence, ritual attunement, and neighborly commensality. That this “practice of everyday pluralism” (217) may stand as a desired alternative to inter-communal conflict is evidenced in changes in the ways the local community has interpreted the shrine. While “the ritual life of the tomb shrine seems largely unchanged from before the 1947 Partition … [there has been a] substantial shift in [its] symbolic significance” (151). Before then, stories about Hayder Shaykh and his tomb legitimated his lineage and dargah, but after Partition local narratives centered on the saint's “role as a uniter of a devotional community made up of multiple religious adherents” (62). Although Bigelow recognizes that Malerkotla's civic pluralism and its “rejection of religious division and … denial of the communalized identities associated with Partition” (ibid.) are vulnerable to the violent dissolution evidenced in Tone Bringa's Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, she shows that cultures of peace can be cultivated and maintained despite, and against, external and internal forces working towards violence and fragmentation.

Sharing the Sacred demonstrates that communities in mixed religious settings are able to coexist without perduring conflicts not because fear of the other makes them do so but rather because they want to do so. Its nuanced presentation of “the daily activities and micro-strategies of engagement that contribute to Malerkotla's peace” (ibid.) is a non-polemical retort to those who contend that inter-communal relations are inherently conflictual.