Introduction
In a recent article, ‘Secularism in the Frame of Religious Heterodoxy’, Gauri Viswanathan asks, ‘How differently would secularism be understood if it was seen through a history omitted from its own narrative?’Footnote 1 She poses this question because she claims that the field of literary studies has naturalized the logic of the secularization thesis that has been revisited and critically interrogated by sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion. Viswanathan attributes this lacuna to the problem that ‘secularism is conceived to be the inaugural moment of literature's formation, a defining aspect of its identity, whose religious traces are no more than a historical reminder of a displaced worldview’.Footnote 2 As a way to undo the normative position secularism has occupied in literary studies, Viswanathan calls for an interrogation of those aspects of religion that have been effaced in process, what she describes as ‘dissonant strains’ of religious heterodoxy that have been omitted from the secular narrative.Footnote 3
This paper explores the encounter between secularism and Islam in the context of colonial South Asia. Specifically, how the logic of secularism has worked to circumscribe the parameters and definitions of Islam and displace ‘dissonant’ Islamic teachings and practices that cannot be assimilated into secularism's epistemic frame. This phenomenon is traced through the life and teachings of the political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah, or Aga Khan III (1877–1957).Footnote 4 Muhammad Shah followed in the footsteps of the famous nineteenth-century Muslim reformer, Syed Ahmad Khan, pursuing Syed Ahmad Khan's campaign against ‘backwardness’ among Muslims and support for continuing British rule. During the nationalist period, Muhammad Shah steered his political agenda in the direction of separatist politics, where he played an integral role in pushing for the installation of separate electorates for Muslims and, as first president of the All India Muslim League, also in the call for Partition.
The idea of Islam that Muhammad Shah invoked was similar to Muhammad Ali Jinnah's—a secular or ‘empty’ category that was politically instrumental for Muslim separatism. That is to say, since Islam (the idea through which Partition was justified) could not be grounded in nationalist sentiments of language, history, or geography, Jinnah appealed to a secular and post-Enlightenment idea of Islam-as-faith.Footnote 5 Similar to Jinnah, secularism was the frame through which Muhammad Shah shaped his vision of Islam, but he configured his ideas about religion and politics through a specifically reformist angle that emphasized progress and social mobility.Footnote 6 An examination of Muhammad Shah's speeches and writings will show how his conception of Islam was informed by secular values of the colonial public sphere, such as western education, participation in political life, and the privatization of religion. I situate Muhammad Shah's position as a response to the pressures exerted on minority groups by nationalism and its colonial legacyFootnote 7 and explore the ways in which these historical contingencies of minority Muslim politics in the colonial context inform the ‘secular grammar’Footnote 8 of Muhammad Shah's formulation of Islam. In particular, I am interested in understanding how his reformist agenda of secular Islam rationalizes or expunges ‘dissonant strains’ of religion. To illustrate this point, I turn to Muhammad Shah's role as Aga Khan III, where, as Imam of the Ismaili community, he was revered as the descendent of Muhammad and object of devotion. Within this sphere of Ismaili religiosity, Muhammad Shah was messianic sovereign of the Ismailis, where his authority rested not on the values and codes of the colonial public domain, but rather, a private domain of vernacular devotion and religious practice.Footnote 9 Through readings of Ismaili devotional literature, the gināns,Footnote 10 I show how the ‘dissonant’ practices of Islam are located in the vernacular; these pre-colonial formations of Islam dislodge and undermine the identitarian cast of the politically instrumental idea of Islam in the modern period. Furthermore, I contend that the beliefs and practices enjoined in ginān poetry offer a history of Islam's acculturation in the Indian context in microcosm—one that is effaced in modern colonial, nationalist, and even Muslim reformist writings. As argued below, these texts are embedded in local contexts; their texture and movement help us understand religious practices that are not derivations of a centripetal or diffusionist notion of identity. In an age often described in terms of ‘the clash of civilizations’, this literary-historical study of earlier expressive forms questions the politics of identity through a study of the ways in which vernacular expressions of Muslim religiosity have been suppressed by identitarian formations of Islam in the modern period.
Cooperative Muslim as secular value
First published in 1871, W.W. Hunter's book, The Indian Musulmans, was written, according to the publisher's note, as an ‘apologia by Sir William Hunter to the question mooted by Lord Mayo: ‘Are the Indian Musulmans bound by their Religion to rebel against the Queen.’Footnote 11 Hunter describes Indian Muslims as a body of people, who have, since ‘Mughal decline’, held themselves ‘aloof’ from society. This aloofness, combined with what Hunter describes as ‘the Muslim duty of rebellion’ that is ‘fully prescribed by Muhammadan Law’, distinguishes ‘dangerous’ Muslims from Hindus:
The Musulmans of India, are, and have been for many years, a source of chronic danger to the British Power in India. For some reason or other they have held aloof from our system, and the changes in which more flexible Hindus have cheerfully acquiesced, are regarded by them as deep personal wrongs.Footnote 12
This kind of representation of Muslims as ‘stagnant’ and ‘aloof’ is not circumscribed to the British colonial perspective, for almost a century later, in The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru explicates on the subject of Muslims in a similar manner. He writes:
Since British rule came to India, Moslems have produced few outstanding figures of the modern type. They have produced some remarkable men, but as a rule, these represented the continuation of the old culture and tradition and did not easily fit in with modern developments.Footnote 13
One of these ‘remarkable men’ Nehru describes later in his book, however, is the famous nineteenth-century Muslim reformer, Syed Ahmad Khan:
After the Mutiny, the Indian Moslems had hesitated which way to turn. . .Sir Syed Ahmad Khan played an important part. He was convinced that he could only raise the Moslems through co-operation with the British authorities. He was anxious to make them accept English education and draw them out of their conservative shells. . . . Sir Syed was an ardent reformer, and he wanted to reconcile modern scientific thought in Islam. . . . He pointed out the basic similarities between Islam and Christianity. He attacked purdah, the seclusion of women, among the Moslems. He was opposed to any allegiance to the Turkish khalifat. Above all, he was anxious to push a new type of educationFootnote 14.
Whereas Hunter describes Muslims as ‘aloof’ from the deep stages of post-mutiny colonial rule—Nehru expresses the dearth of ‘modern type’ Muslims from the perspective of the nationalist struggle. What both colonial and Indian nationalist visions share is the secular value of a good citizen—one who casts aside religion and ‘cooperates’ in the eyes of Hunter, and ‘modernizes’ from the perspective of Nehru. What is clear from Nehru's description of Syed Ahmad Khan is that Syed Ahmad's pioneering efforts in helping Muslims overcome ‘aloofness’ and ‘backwardness’ represents for Nehru, Syed Ahmad Khan's commitment to secular values. Nehru explains further, that in addition to promoting education and facilitating the progress of his fellow Muslims, Syed Ahmad Khan was not opposed to Congress on the grounds that it was Hindu, but because ‘he thought it was politically too aggressive’. Nehru sees Syed Ahmad Khan as socially engaged, politically moderate, and most importantly, non-communitarian. In underscoring both ecumenical and secular aspects of Syed Ahmad Khan's project of reform (as drawing similarities between Islam and Christianity and emphasizing how ‘religious differences should have no political or national significance’), Nehru makes it a point to show that this kind of Indian Muslim—educated, active in public life, and willing to cast aside religion in the face of politics—is the type of Muslim necessary to sustain a secular nationalist vision.
Muhammad Shah and muslim reform
Muhammad Shah, like Syed Ahmad Khan, promulgated the importance of western secular values throughout his public political career as a Muslim leader and reformer. For example, he gave many public addresses and wrote at length in papers to the Muslim community about the importance of education. In his ‘Presidential Address to the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference’ in 1902, Muhammad Shah discussed the subject of education in relation to a series of related topics:
That you have attended this Conference at all, in spite of all these splendid attractions, is due I believe, to the fact that though education is our theme, we are deliberating upon something more important than the suitability of this or that textbook, or this or that course of study. We are, if I understand the purpose of this Conference aright, considering what in modern times are the ideals we must hold before our people and the paths by which they attain them; and upon the right answer to these questions depends no trifling matter, but nothing less than the future of Indian Moslems. . . . We are undertaking a formidable task when we attempt to correct and remodel the ideals of our people. But for the task before us, we Indian Musulmans possess many advantages; we have the advantage of living under a Government which administers justice evenly between rich and poor and between persons of different creeds and classes.Footnote 15
This speech begins with the point that although Muslims have the ‘advantage’ of living under British rule, they have not fully taken up all the possible options, the first and foremost being education. Muhammad Shah elaborates on this point later in the speech, claiming that while many madrassahs continue to impart ‘parrot-like teaching of the Koran’, there are few Muslims who have taken up the opportunity of British education.Footnote 16 Following Syed Ahmad Khan's work in promoting western science as part of education, he states, ‘throughout the whole length and breadth of India, how many national schools are there in existence which educate Moslem boys and girls in their faith, and at the same time in modern secular science’Footnote 17 He connects this problem of education among Muslims to their ‘apathy’ towards progress in civil society—a disposition that he locates as Muslims’ ‘futile laments over the loss of political power’.Footnote 18 He explains that ‘Now that general liberty is given to all, the monopoly, or even a desire for the monopoly, of political power is both immoral and of no benefit’.Footnote 19 Instead, he encourages Muslims to work within the structure of British rule, to strive towards ‘industrial and financial pre-eminence’ even though, thus far Muslims ‘have neglected industry and commerce, just as we have neglected every other opportunity of progress’.Footnote 20 Similar to Nehru's description of Syed Ahmad Khan's work in drawing Muslims out of their ‘conservative shells’, Muhammad Shah's call for Muslims to relinquish aspirations for political power and instead participate in civil society is also situated in relation to a larger agenda of preserving a forward-thinking Islam: ‘It is to this class in India that I appeal and desire most earnestly to impress upon them my conviction that, if they continue in their present attitude of aloofness, it means the certain extinction of Islam, at least as a world-wide religion’.Footnote 21
According to Muhammad Shah, progress, or what he calls ‘an attempt to correct and remodel the ideals of our people’ is necessarily tied to a re-ordering and reconfiguration of Islam. In this regard, he finds it necessary to address the ‘terrible position of women’, and overcoming ‘aloofness’ by education rather than spending one's energy in ‘prayer and pilgrimage’.Footnote 22 He describes pilgrimage and celebrations of martyrdoms as events that ‘only help to keep alive those sectarian differences which are one of the misfortunes of Islam’.Footnote 23 Invoking the time of the Prophet, he claims ‘the example of the Prophet and of Abu Bakr and Omar and Ali should convince these pious people that the first duty of a Moslem is to give his time to the service of his nation and not merely to silent prayers’.Footnote 24
Whereas discussion of these reform issues—education, women, and pan-Muslim unity—form part of a larger agenda of progress that Muhammad Shah shared with Muslim reformers such as Syed Ahmad Khan, the Aga Khan's participation in the Muslim separatist movement—what Nehru refers to as the ‘negation of democracy’—proved to be a challenge to Indian nationalist secular ideology. In this regard, Muhammad Shah's life as a Muslim reformer is distinctive from Syed Ahmad Khan's: while both were considered ‘cooperative’ in the eyes of the British, Muhammad Shah became involved in the single most factious project to the nationalists: the campaign for separate electorates for Muslims.
Muhammad Shah and minority separatism
Muslims were first analyzed as an aggregate in India in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 25 During this period, ethnographies about caste and religious groups were codified through the law and the census, thereby marking the first juncture at which the subject of identity was taken up as a colonial state project.Footnote 26 The second transformative moment for Muslim identity in Indian history, ‘enabled by the census figures’,Footnote 27 was the period in which Muslims called for separate electorates. During the early 1900s, Muslim leaders addressed issues such as the growing inertia and marginalization of Muslim voices in Indian society. As a result, a group of leaders formed an organization called the ‘Mohammadan Political Association’ that discussed political issues at stake for Muslims, namely fear of Hindu power, loyalty to British rule, and the great need for separate Muslim representation.Footnote 28 As this organization grew in numbers and consolidated its agenda, it developed into the ‘Simla Deputation’, consisting of seventy representatives, who made their case to Viceroy Minto for the recognition and representation of Muslims as a community in the electoral system. As facilitator of the deputation, the Aga Khan successfully negotiated the concerns of the Deputation with the British.Footnote 29 What followed from the Simla Deputation were the Morely-Minto reforms,Footnote 30 and finally, the creation of the All India Muslim League, with the Aga Khan elected as its first president.
Muhammad Shah's project of reform was not aimed solely at social uplift and progress. It had, as his participation in the Simla Deputation and establishment of the Muslim League reveal, a much broader political vision that asked for separate representation for Muslims both on local bodies and legislative councils, essentially the right to vote for one's own representatives. In this way, Muhammad Shah's position on education, overcoming ‘aloofness’, and participating in civic life were fostered to cultivate a minority position that did not seek to interfere in or question British rule in India.Footnote 31 Muhammad Shah's reform project, although sharing (or adopting) a similar structural and social vision as that of Syed Ahmad Khan, was ultimately taken to a straightforwardly communitarian end: the formation of the Muslim League.
Although most scholars agree on the ‘direct line of development from Muslim ‘communalism’, to ‘separatism’ to Pakistan's creation’,Footnote 32 there is some debate surrounding the contours of communalism. Francis Robinson, for example, ascribes the origins of communalism, from which Muslim leaders took their lead in politics, to long-standing differences between Hindus and Muslims,Footnote 33 and Paul Brass specifically locates the problem with elite politics, whereby the Muslim elite manipulated religious symbols to protect their own powerFootnote 34. Gyanendra Pandey attributes communalism to the hegemony of the British, claiming that Muslims and Hindus were represented as fixed and unchanging entities (in which internal differences were elided) as part of the colonial state's master policy of divide and rule that kept the two groups from aligning against British rule.Footnote 35 The more recent contribution of Aamir Mufti has re-oriented the terms of this debate about communalism and separatism altogether. For Mufti, the different kinds of identitarian projects—communalism or separatism—obfuscate the larger issue at stake, namely that nationalism itself created terms of inclusion and exclusion, is its outstanding feature. He is therefore interested in the conditions of the minority, and in particular, the ‘process of minoritization, the pressures exerted in language, literature, culture and identity in the process of becoming minoritized’.Footnote 36
While it is relevant to think about how Muhammad Shah played a particular role as an elite leader in promoting Muslim separatist politics and the overall hegemony of the colonial state in establishing oppositions between Hindus and Muslims, of specific interest are the ways in which elite leadership invokes pan-Muslim unity to the end purpose of solidifying a ‘minority’ position. Within the Indian nationalist context, therefore, it is this majoritarian secular nationalist imaginary through which the minority position takes shape and represents itself. The Aga Khan's speeches reveal how his campaign for pan-Muslim unity and representation are contingent upon the Nehruvian ‘grammar’ of the secular—one that is undoubtedly driven by a set of values that ‘bring together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life’.Footnote 37 According to this particular notion of the secular in the project of reform, a normative set of parameters of the ‘cooperative’ or ‘progressive’ Muslim are established to fit the needs of a specific agenda—in this case, Muslim representation in the political structure. The Aga Khan's campaign for Muslim unity calls upon the ‘Muslim’ to embrace specific secular values, such as progress and education, and to relinquish notions of differences within the tradition itself (as the Aga Khan himself states ‘sectarian differences. . . are one of the misfortunes of Islam’). This notion of ‘secular-as-modern’ of course, is nothing new in the history of Muslim reform leadership. What is of interest here is how this notion of the secular necessitates an effacement of inherent diversity and heterogeneity of Islam, which ultimately points to the epistemic parameters of the ‘secular’ at work in the project of pan-Muslim unity. This specific understanding of the secular Muslim is made especially apparent when analyzed in conjunction with ‘opposing’,Footnote 38 expressions: what I locate in traditions of vernacular Islam.
Colonial identifications and legacies
Before turning to a discussion of South Asian vernacular Islam and Muhammad Shah's role as Ismaili Imam, first an explanation is needed of the tangled historical process through which Ismaili identity was constituted in the nineteenth century. In the ruling of the Aga Khan Case of 1866, the caste group of khojas was given an ‘Ismaili’ religious identity by the Bombay High Court. This judgment was decided after a 24-day trial held because a group of Bombay khoja caste leaders filed a suit against the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and exile who was recognized as a caste leader and object of devotion by some khojas in the mid-nineteenth century. The plaintiffs claimed that the property of the khojas belonged only to members of the khoja caste, and since the Aga Khan was not a khoja, he had no right to intervene in caste and property issues. Although the disagreements between the two sides centred specifically on the control of caste affairs and property ownership, the property dispute of 1866 ultimately resolved the question of religious identity—of the khojas and of the Aga Khan. In the final judgment, the judge proclaimed that khojas were Ismaili Muslim, the Aga Khan was Imam of this ‘sect’, and as such, rightful owner of khoja caste property.Footnote 39
The gināns became essential to the colonial state's constitution of this Muslim identity in nineteenth-century India. The judge insisted that it was imperative to decide the religious identity of the khojas and the Aga Khan before resolving the property issue. The defense was able to successfully work this angle of religion. They argued that the Aga Khan was the same religion as the khojas, and used the khojas’ religious text, the Dasavatār ginān,Footnote 40 to justify this point. The defense offered an interpretation of the poem to prove that the khojas were specifically Ismaili Muslim. They schematized Dasavatār as a text that narrated conversion to Islam, claiming that the first nine chapters narrate stories of Vaishnava, that is to say Hindu, avatars, but the final chapter distinctly focuses on Ali, the first Shiite Imam. This theological division enjoined in the khojas’ ‘religious work’, they argued, attested to the history and identity of khojas as Hindu converts to Ismaili Islam. The defense's reading of the poem, was in turn, validated by the presiding judge, Justice Arnould, in the final judgment of 1866. The judge decided that the khojas were Ismaili Muslim through this specific reading of Dasavatār. Explaining that the first nine chapters of Dasavatār narrate stories of Hindu avatars, but the final chapter specifically focuses on Ali, the first Shiite Imam, the judge concluded that this particular theological division in the text attested to the history and identity of khojas as Hindu converts to Ismaili Islam.Footnote 41
With the introduction of print technology into the self-documentation of the Ismaili community in 1900, Aga Khan III or Muhammad Shah (the grandson of the first Aga Khan) mandated initiatives in the direction of canon formation—the first undertaken by members of the Ismaili community itself. It seems that the gināns were first collected with the purpose of producing an authoritative canon during the Imamate of Aga Khan II, but Aga Khan III furthered this process extensively by officially appointing a publisher, Lalji Devraj. Devraj's initiatives included an exhaustive search and compilation of ginān manuscripts, in which some 3,500 manuscripts were supposedly destroyed, and the production of a series of five volumes (each containing one hundred gināns) printed at the khoja community's own press, Khoja Sindhi Press.Footnote 42 This first canon initiative was marked by a series of changes to the poems, such as the discarding of ‘Hindu’ names (Hari, Krishna, etc.), the insertion of Islamic ones, and most notably, the addition of new gināns that address Aga Khan III as the primary object of devotion.
Enthronement HymnFootnote 43
O Ali, in the fair assembly gloriously adorned, with carpets spread upon the floor, Sultan Muhammad Shah the Lord has ascended the throne.
Blessed be your rule today! Blessed be your rule, o light of Ali's eyes!
Blessed be your rule, o Lord, descendant of the Prophet! Blessed be your rule today!
O Ali, to gain vision of you, Lord, your entire Indian community has come.
They duly present their offerings, Lord, devoting their lives to you.
O Ali, from the first day your fortune has bestowed greatness upon you.
Lord, from the lips of Lord Ali Shah, there issued the words: ‘Sultan Muhammad Shah is the Lord’.
O Ali, to call you ‘Lord’ is your due, for you bear the signs of noble fortune on your brow.
At this young age your rank is lofty, betokening your greatness.
O Ali, blessed be your royal throne and umbrella, o beloved descendant of the Lady Zahra.
Your power comes from the father of Lord Hasan, enhancing your glory.
O Ali, at the news of your coronation, light pours down from heaven.
With plates of pearls in their hands, the houris shower offerings upon the Lord.
Oh, Ali, when the believers in the guest-house celebrate this occasion as at Id, they recite the Shamsi prayer and experience the delights of spiritual enlightenment.
O Ali, to offer you his congratulations, this Sayyid submits his humble prayer: may the Lord of Najaf be your protector, and may your enemies be destroyed!Footnote 44
This ginān from the first official canon, ‘Enthronement Hymn’, illustrates the ways in which Muhammad Shah was able to officially inscribe his position as an object of devotion. The ‘Enthronement Hymn’ poem deploys familiar concepts and themes of the tradition of ginān poetry, such as the importance of a community of devotees and the exaltation and devotion to a messianic figure of authority. What Muhammad Shah was able to achieve through print, however, is the insertion of his official status as divine leader of the community. In this poem, for example, the Aga Khan establishes his authority through a skilful manoeuvring of epithets, in which two objects of devotion are placed side by side and rendered interchangeable: Sultan Muhammad Shah and Ali, the descendent of the Prophet. In the opening verses, for example, it is unclear which figure is equated with ‘descendent of the Prophet’:
O Ali, in the fair assembly gloriously adorned, with carpets spread upon the floor,
Sultan Muhammad Shah the Lord has ascended the throne.
Blessed be your rule today! Blessed be your rule, O light of Ali's eyes!
Blessed be your rule, O Lord, descendant of the Prophet! Blessed be your rule today!
In the set of verses that follow, Ali and Sultan Muhammad Shah are brought together once again, in an even more elided and indistinguishable formulation: ‘Lord, from the lips of Lord Ali Shah’, there issued the words: ‘Sultan Muhammad Shah is the Lord’. By having Muhammad Shah's divinity pronounced by Ali himself the historical event of Muhammad Shah's ‘coronation’ is authorized and made continuous with a prior tradition of Shiite devotion. In this peculiar account of the coronation event sanctioned by Ali, the community of devotees is also present, as they are described as presenting offerings and bestowing devotion to Ali/Muhammad Shah. As evidenced in ‘Enthronement Hymn’, Ismaili religiosity is framed explicitly within the terms of specifically Shiite devotion. Here, all ‘un-Islamic’ aspects of religious expression are expunged and what remains is a sectarian and Shiite instantiation of Islam. The new Ismaili community envisioned in print assumes an altogether distinct and sectarian idea of Muslim identity, when compared with Muhammad Shah's paradigm of Muslim unity promulgated for the public. This is not only because the hierarchical and vertical structure of Ismaili Islam is at odds with the egalitarian idea of the Muslim in the public sphere, but is more significantly, because the Aga Khan himself, claiming authority as divine Imam, disrupts the unifying and secular conception of Muslim identity.
In the above ginān, Muhammad Shah's ‘coronation’ is given meaning through the term ‘takht’, translated as throne. The idea of the ‘takht’ is imbricated, in the ginān poetic tradition, within a vernacular and messianic tradition of devotion. Turning to an example of this, the prior tradition of devotion as expressed in Dasavatār, we can see the ways in which messianic notions of arrival—those attributed to Muhammad Shah's coronation in ‘Enthronement Hymn’—are given meaning through a much more complex constellation of religious ideas than just Shiite Islam, as conveyed in the canonized ginān. The term ‘takht’ is discussed further below, but first is a brief discussion of the Dasavatār poem itself.
The Dasavatār poem
In Dasavatār the protagonist of the poem, the tenth avatar, is introduced at the beginning of the text, but he does not actually appear in the text until it is time to fight the evil demon, Kalingo. The introductory verses leading up to this moment mostly focus on conveying the imminence of this confrontation through the messenger of the poem, Pir Shams. Pir Shams arrives at the house of the evil demon Kalingo, in order to deliver a message to Kalingo's wife, Queen Suraja:
Where Queen Suraja is sitting, at the very moment, assuming the form of a parrot, Pir Shams speaks:
Listen, Queen Suraja, to the knowledge of the Atharva Veda, so that later you may attain a place in the eternal abode.
Today, O Queen, you have come to the royal threshold of the house of the demon, but now your life is going to be wasted.
On hearing such words, the queen was amazed;
The queen went and touched the feet of Pir Shams, who was in the form of a parrot.
Then Pir Shams spoke the truth.
Listen Queen Suraja, to the subject of the Atharva veda.
Queen, in the Krita era, the Rg Veda was current.
Then the devotee Prahlada attained liberation with five krores of beings.
In that era Hari assumed four forms, the deva, the Shah himself destroyed four demons.
Queen, know that in the second Treta era, the Yajur Veda was current
Then the deva rescued the devotee Harishchandra with seven crores of beings. In that era, the Shah himself destroyed three demons.
Queen, know the third era, to be Dvapara, when the Sama Veda was the basis of authority.
The Pandavas were rescued with nine crores of beings. In that era, the deva, the Shah himself, destroyed two demons. Then King Yudhisthira achieved liberation with nine krores—they attained a place in the eternal abode.
Today, in the Kali era, the place of Hari is in the Atharva Veda.
So, today, in the Kali era, Hari is the tenth incarnation.
That deva, the lord Murari, has assumed the Nakalaki incarnation. He will kill your husband, Oh Lady.Footnote 45
In the above passage, Pir Shams narrates the feats of the tenth avatar—here referred to as ‘Hari’—and his pending confrontation with the queen's husband, Kalingo. Pir Shams conveys his message through the authority of the classical Sanskrit ritual texts, the Vedas, as well as through cyclical ideas of time (yugas) and the tradition of divine descents (avatars) that emerge from the Sanskrit narrative tradition of the puranas.Footnote 46 What is significant about this ritual and temporal setup is the emphasis on the Atharva Veda, which is introduced as the primary ‘subject’ (vāt) at hand. From the classical Sanskrit perspective, the Atharva veda is one of four ritual texts, with no greater authoritative claim over the other three. Here, however, not only is the Atharva Veda removed from its traditional role as a ritual text, but its significance is isolated and re-interpreted by the Pir as knowledge of the central forthcoming event: that ‘Hari’ will kill the Queen's husband, Kalingo. This final messianic event forms part of a larger set of teachings and practices in Dasavatār, which is explicated by Pir Shams later in the text as the satpanth (true path):
Listen, Queen Suraja, so Pir Shams speaks his thought.
Today in this era, understand the satpanth as truth.
So, Queen, without the satpanth no one has attained knowledge.
Therefore, O Queen, without the true guru there is no salvation.
Queen, in this era, worship the satpanth as true.
Then only, Queen Suraja, you will cross over safely.
Queen, follow the satpanth secretly, So that the demon may not know.Footnote 47
Upon hearing about satpanth teaching from Shams, the Queen responds with full comprehension of his message:
Lord, whatever service was left undone by us in our previous life,
For that reason, we have truly come to the house of the demon.Footnote 48
Lord, our birth was in that house.
But now, due to the guide, the true guru, we have become eternal.Footnote 49
In the previous passage, the reader is introduced to the terms of the new satpanth teaching, where the Atharva veda is equated with the tenth avatar's confrontation and destruction of the evil demon. In the above verses, Queen Suraja expresses her understanding of her station in life as Kalingo's wife through the philosophy of karma. She discovers that escape from her condition, specifically, the desired state of immortality (amara) has become a possibility through the satpanth teaching imparted by the Pir. In this way, we discover that ideas of rebirth (karma) and the desire for release from this world (mukti) are also central to satpanth philosophy.
Dasavatār's invocation of classical Sanskrit ideas underscores Sheldon Pollock's point that the rise of the vernacular in South Asia was made against the background of Sanskrit and deeply conditioned by Sanskrit literary culture.Footnote 50 Beginning in the ninth century—in both Western Europe and South Asia—local writers began to form literary traditions of writing in response to classical languages. As part of a conscious decision to reshape the boundaries of their cultural universe, the vernacular became the medium through which writers put hieratic languages such as Sanskrit to new and diverse uses. The vernacular was also the means through which popular religion defined itself against Brahmanic teachings and ideas. David Lorenzen explains how popular religious movements—often referred to as ‘panths’ (as in satpanth) in the medieval and early modern context—were socio-religious groups that were demarcated by particular social ideology traditionally transmitted through songs, verses, stories, and everyday ritual practices.Footnote 51 Popular religious movements were defined by groups of ordinary persons who shared a common set of beliefs and practices and a related set of social, moral and political norms and goals.Footnote 52
As discussed above, Dasavatār conveys a common set of beliefs and practices, through the notion of the satpanth, which is given meaning through ideas of proper action and liberation (karma and mukti) and the cycle of Vaishnava avatars that emerge from late Vedic and puranic thought. What is interesting about the invocation of these ideas is that they are not appropriated in a direct or straightforward way, for it is in the reworking of these classical Sanskritic concepts that the unique message and structure of the satpanth can be understood. Just as the idea of the Atharva Veda is reconfigured to convey the forthcoming arrival of the final avatar, the figure of the final avatar himself is not exclusively represented through classical Sanskrit ideas and texts. The final avatar is simultaneously the means through which the ‘imamate paradigm’Footnote 53 of messianic Shiite thought is activated in the text.Footnote 54 In the opening lines of the tenth chapter of Dasavatār, for example, the hero of the poem, the tenth avatar, is introduced as ‘hidden’ in an ‘Araba desha’:
Today, in the tenth vessel, Hari is the Nakalaki incarnation.
Today, he is sitting in the Arab country.
So, how many of the important deeds of Hari could one tell?
That Deva remains hidden today in the Kali eraFootnote 55.
In Dasavatār, the tenth avatar (most frequently described as the ‘Shah’) is the ‘expected deliverer who is to come and humble or destroy the forces of wickedness and establish the rule of justice and equity on earth’.Footnote 56 The Shah, who sits in ‘a place where nobody knows’ is very much in accordance with Shiite Mahdi practice which rests on the idea not of a Christian ‘second coming’ but as an ‘appearance (zuhur)’ or a ‘rise’, to commence a ‘great social transformation’.Footnote 57 In the text, the movement out of occultation is narrated through the mode of anticipation, for the poem primarily employs the future tense to describe the imminence of the Shah's confrontation with the demon, Kalingo, and the establishment of his rule. Because of this mood of anticipation, it is not the actual event that is given the most attention, but rather the details of the pre-confrontation—the condition of the world prior to his rule and the portrayal of the Shah's journey. For example, the poem explains that the arrival of the Shah and his confrontation with Kalingo's army will take place in the setting of the Kaliyug. This is a time, according to the poem, in which the world will turn upside down both physically, whereby the waters dry up and there is a shortage of food, as well as socially, where women will abandon their children, Brahmins marry shudras, and overall, people will be fraudulent and deceitful.Footnote 58 The series of inversions that transpire in the Kaliyug are the signs that the Shah is to arrive in India with his army.Footnote 59 The poem culminates in the confrontation between the Shah and Kalingo. The extensive description of the Shah's arrival to India leads to an important moment in the text in which he is described as sitting on a decorated ‘takht’, or throne.Footnote 60 Seating himself on the throne marks the moment in which both armies confront each other, and ultimately the Shah takes his sword and slays the entire army of the demon.Footnote 61 Thereafter, the verses that follow describe the new condition in which the Shah will rule:
Then all the gathered creation is recreated
There, the Shah causes all the believers to rule.
Then my Shah will sit upon a large round cushion.
There, guru Muhammad will be the vizier.Footnote 62
Whereas ‘Enthronement Hymn’ circumscribes Ismaili religiosity and devotion to Muhammad Shah within solely Muslim idioms and devotion, the example from Dasavatār illustrates how the vernacular's revaluing of literary forms and figures set in motion particular ways of imagining community and belonging that are not based upon a restrictive conception of identity. In Dasavatār, the central moments of the narrative pivot on the mood of messianic expectation, and this mood is articulated through the extensive description of the tenth avatar's arrival to India. The ‘takht’ or throne represents the future messianic event of the rise from occultation, confrontation with evil, and establishment of justice.
Scholarly discussions about ginān poetry have continued to replicate the logic of the colonial court, whereby messianic concepts in the gināns are interpreted as instantiations of Ismaili Muslim identity in the Indian context.Footnote 63 However, I argue that messianic ideas of the ginān poetic tradition compel us to think about Islam from perspectives that are not bound by notions of sect or ‘identity’. My interest in opening up the identitarian claims over the ginān tradition through messianic ideas finds a related expression in recent literary and philosophical commentaries on the Judeo-Christian tradition. In his book, The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agamben explains that the Christian Church, over two thousand years of translation and commentary, has expunged all messianic ideas from Paul's Letters, the canonical messianic texts of Christianity.Footnote 64 He claims that both ‘Church’ and ‘Synagogue’ are complicit in relegating Paul to the role as founder of Christianity because both are invested in suppressing the Jewish-messianic perspective from which Paul writes his Letters.Footnote 65 Following the ideas of Jacob Taubes, Agamben attempts to redress the ways in which the Christian Church has written out the concept of the Messiah in Paul's Letters. For Agamben, messianic time, or what he explains as ‘to live in the Messiah’, represent an exceptional and revolutionary critique of the law (nomos). Agamben interprets the ideas of ‘remaining time’ in Paul's Letters as the suspension of all social conditions and the undoing of any kind of appropriation or ‘juridical/factical’ identity.Footnote 66 As he illustrates with his reading of the term kletos (calling), for example, all worldly conditions are transformed with the immediacy of ‘the time that remains’. In this way, one's kletos, or calling, in the remaining time necessitates a ‘revocation’ of one's condition from the top down, ‘an urgency that works it from within and hollows it out, nullifying it in the very gesture of maintaining and dwelling in it’.Footnote 67
Agamben supports Taubes’ point about Paul's messianic thought with an argument about language, specifically Paul's Greek. He explains that Paul belongs to a Jewish diaspora community that ‘thinks and speaks in Greek in precisely the same manner that Sephardim would speak Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish) and the Ashkenzi Yiddish’.Footnote 68 He describes Paul's Greek as ‘Yiddish’ or what he also explains as a ‘minor language’, a quintessentially (diasporic) ‘jargon’. Agamben would claim that it is the distinctive medium of Paul's poetic vernacular Greek that allows for the exceptional message of remaining time in the Letter to the Romans. I would argue something slightly different with the gināns. There is nothing exceptional, ‘minor’, or ‘jargonish’ about the gināns as conduits of vernacular Islam.Footnote 69 What I am trying to underscore in my analyses of Dasavatār is how the vernacular register of the gināns conveys a messianic imaginary that not only eludes but also conflicts with identitarian readings of the texts. As discussed above, Dasavatār conveys Shiite ideas through classical Sanskrit concepts drawn from the Vedic and puranic traditions. Similar to what Agamben conveys with the messianic ‘revocation’, this new teaching of Dasavatār, satpanth, is indeed the reconfiguration and ‘hollowing out’ of the old. Ideas such as karma, and mukti (liberation) that are steeped in the post-Vedic frame are given new meaning with the expectation of the messiah's arrival. Moreover, the figure himself—as an avatar and Imam—is imbricated within Shiite, Vaishnava, and sometimes even Buddhist idioms.Footnote 70 The messiah, in this instance, is manifested not as an entity as such, but rather, as an undoing of identity. That is to say, the pluralistic and indigenous constellation of the messianic in the ginān Dasavatār illustrates how the dynamics and imaginaries at work in the vernacular register escape the modes of thematization that are enjoined in secular and identitarian conceptions of Islam.
Conclusion
This paper has discussed modern Muslim identity through an analysis of two aspects of Muhammad Shah's life: his role as secular Muslim political leader and his position as Ismaili Imam. Muhammad Shah's ideas about Islam were formulated within the colonial and Nehruvian understanding of modern Muslim identity that held to secular values of modernity, education and progress. While focusing this reform project in the direction of Muslim separatism, and ultimately, Partition, Muhammad Shah simultaneously occupied an altogether distinct leadership role among the Ismaili community. Unlike the nature of his leadership in the public domain—one that was formulated through the values of secular Islam and secular leadership—in the domain of religion, he assumed a divine intercessory role as Ismaili messianic sovereign. This new position of authority was officially sanctioned through Muhammad Shah's canonization directives in the early twentieth century. The production of this first canon of gināns circumscribed the parameters of Ismaili Islam—which were first outlined in 1866—even further along sectarian lines. As the poem ‘Enthronement Hymn’ reveals, these new terms of Ismaili devotion were brought in line with primarily Shiite ideas, configured with Muhammad Shah as the primary object of devotion.
Print alone, however, was not the only factor that secured his position as messianic sovereign. As I demonstrated with my reading of ‘takht’ in Dasavatār, the earlier tradition of satpanth beliefs and practices that cohered around the idea of ‘messianic time’ provided a theological opening for Muhammad Shah to assert his divine intercessory authority. It was therefore not solely the medium of print and production of new gināns such as ‘Enthronement Hymn’ that created the conditions in which Muhammad Shah could occupy the seat of the ‘takht’: messianic fulfillment was also made possible by a prior vernacular tradition of messianic expectation.
Muhammad Shah, therefore, was able to secure this role for himself by means of new conceptions of messianism as well as the reworking of old messianic ideas in the ginān poetic tradition. The old ideas of possibility and expectation that were essential to the future messianic event associated with the signifier ‘takht’ in Dasavatār were rearticulated and rendered significant with Muhammad Shah as ‘messiah’. In this regard, Muhammad Shah's claim to divine authority parallels what Agamben has described as the Christian appropriation of Jesus. That is to say, just as the institutionalization of Christianity appropriated Jesus as fulfilling the function of ‘messianic’ time established by a prior Jewish-messianic tradition, so did the new terms of Ismaili identity, as outlined in the new medium of print, serve to canonize Muhammad Shah as the long-awaited messianic Imam.
In the public sphere, Muhammad Shah's discussions about Muslim education and progress spoke to colonial and reformist projects of the time. Muhammad Shah's speeches to the Indian Muslim community reveal how this specific idea of Islam functioned to homogenize or erase practices and beliefs that did not adhere to this secular vision. What Muhammad Shah's canonization directives demonstrate, however, is that these ‘dissonant’ ideas needed to be recoded in the religious domain as well. The gināns that were part of the new canon, such as ‘Enthronement Hymn’ reveal how the older and more complex literary and devotional traditions of South Asian Islam were reformulated as in response to identitarian exigencies within the Ismaili community. In this way, both reformist as well as sectarian claims to identity have occluded the mixed and pluralistic formations through which Islam indigenized in South Asia. Only by turning to texts such as Dasavatār—that are part of an earlier moment in the history of the Ismaili community—is it possible to recapture those expressions of South Asian Islam that have eluded the discourse of Muslim identity in the modern period.
