Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines In Punjab
Download Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines In Punjab PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines In Punjab book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab
This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as well as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.
Artisans, Sufis, Shrines
Author: Hussain Ahmad Khan
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2020-03-19
In nineteenth-century Punjab, a cultural tug-of-war ensued as both Sufi mystics and British officials aimed to engage the local artisans as a means of realizing their ideological ambitions. When it came to influence and impact, the Sufi shrines had a huge advantage over the colonial art institutions, such as the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore. The mystically-inspired shrines, built as a statement of Muslim ruling ambitions, were better suited to the task of appealing to local art traditions. By contrast the colonial institutions, rooted in the Positivist Romanticism of the Victorian West, found assimilation to be more of a challenge. In questioning their relative success and failures at influencing local culture, the book explores the extent to which political control translates into cultural influence. Folktales, Sufi shrines, colonial architecture, institutional education methods and museum exhibitions all provide a wealth of sources for revealing the complex dynamic between the Punjabi artisans, the Sufi community and the colonial British. In this unique look at a little-explored aspect of India's history, Hussain Ahmad Khan explores this evidence in order to illuminate this web of cultural influences. Examining the Sufi-artisan relationship within the various contexts of political revolt, the decline of the Mughals and the struggle of the Sufis to establish an Islamic state, this book argues that Sufi shrines were initially constructed with the aim of affirming a distinct 'Muslim' identity. At the same time, art institutions established by colonial officials attempted to promote eclectic architecture representing the 'British Indian empire', as well as to revive the pre-colonial traditions with which they had previously seemed out of touch. This important book sheds new light on the dynamics of power and culture in the British Empire.
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief? On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.