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Poetics of Piety: Genre, Self-Fashioning, and the Mappila Lifescape1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

ARAM KUZHIYAN MUNEER
ARAM KUZHIYAN MUNEER*
Affiliation:
Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, [email protected]
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Extract

Notwithstanding a recent resurgence of scholarly interest in what one may call “Mappila Studies”—the body of scholarship on the Muslims of Malabar in the Malayalam-speaking South Indian state of Kerala—research on this community still leaves too much to be desired. As for the fate of Mappila literary culture within this incipient field of study, scholars have either given short shrift to or painted in broad brushstrokes the impressive literary legacy of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar despite its enormous historic/al and socio-cultural value.2 That said, even the tiny array of scholarly works, mostly by Malayali scholars, that seeks to treat of Mappila literature has largely approached the subject, I argue, from a provincialised “literary” vantage point, thereby reducing the whole of Mappila narratives to mere aesthetic artifacts having no bearing upon the lives of Mappilas. I call this dominant paradigm of doing Mappila literature “literarisation”—that is, fetishising the “literariness” of text by privileging its formal, stylistic, and aesthetic features over its social tone and life. This view assumes text to be a domain of symbols separable from a domain of practice and disregards the social production of text which cannot be abstracted out from the materialities giving shape to it.3

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 423 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Field research for this article was carried out with a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) from the University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi. I thank the UGC for this generous support. I am grateful to the Fulbright Board, Washington D. C., and the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF), New Delhi, for a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley in Fall 2013 and Spring 2014, during which preliminary drafts of this article were written.

References

2 I employ the term “literary culture” throughout the essay not just descriptively but, more importantly, analytically as well. A literary culture is constituted by social practices of people composing, singing, reciting, reading, copying, printing, and circulating texts. See Pollock, Sheldon, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture, 12: 3 (2000), pp. 591–625 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, (ed.) Holquist, Micahel, (tr.) Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Micahel (Austin, 1981)Google Scholar. Other reductionist lenses related to “literarisation” through which Mappila literature has been hitherto examined are “folklorisation” and “cultural syncretism.” While syncretism is well known as a rubric of multidisciplinary use to characterise and examine cultural and religious exchange, interaction, and mixture, I want to briefly emphasise the two different senses in which I deploy the term “folklorisation”. First, folklorisation as the act of reducing to a fixed, stable entity of folklore the literary cultures that straddle the conventional binaries of the written and the oral, the literary and the traditional. Second, drawing on Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, 2005), pp. 48–53 Google Scholar, folklorisation as understanding literary cultures as a form of mere entertainment or as a means to simply express, rather than form, one's identity, religious or otherwise.

4 See Hanks, William, “Text and Textuality,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989), pp. 95–127 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Freeman, Rich, “Genre and Society: The Literary Culture of Premodern Kerala” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, (ed.) Pollock, Sheldon (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 436–500 Google Scholar.

5 Asad, Talal, “The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, (ed.) Scott, David and Hirschkind, Charles (Stanford, 2006), pp. 243–303 Google Scholar.

6 Gordon, Colin, “Introduction” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, (ed.) Faubion, James, (tr.) Hurley, Robert et al (New York, 2000), p. xix Google Scholar; original emphasis).

7 Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, (ed.) Rabinow, Paul and Rose, Nikolas (New York, 2003), p. 126 Google Scholar.

8 Foucault, Michel, “Technologies of the Self” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, (ed.) Rabinow, Paul and Rose, Nikolas (New York, 2003), p. 146 Google Scholar.

9 Rabinow, Paul and Rose, Nikolas, “Introduction: Foucault Today” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, (ed.) Rabinow, Paul and Rose, Nikolas (New York, 2003), pp. vii–xxxv Google Scholar.

10 Foucault, Michel, The Use of Pleasure: Vol 2 of The History of Sexuality, (tr.) Hurley, Robert (New York, 1985), p. 27 Google Scholar. “Mode of subjectivation” is the second component of Foucault's fourfold scheme of ethics [or “the ethical fourfold,” to use Paul Rabinow, “Introduction” in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, (ed.) Paul Rabinow, (tr.) Robert Hurley et al (New York, 1997), p. xxvii], the first being “ethical substance,” third “ethical work,” and the fourth “telos.” The ethical substance refers to “the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct,” for example, the human body; ethical work is the work that “one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one's conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one's behavior”—in short, the various techniques of the self such as sexual austerity and renunciation of pleasures, to cite Foucault's examples; and the telos of the ethical subject is the establishment of a “moral conduct that commits an individual. . .to a certain mode of being. . .characteristic of the ethical subject”. Thus for Foucault, one's relation to oneself—i. e., self-formation as an “ethical subject”—is “a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal.” This process demands that the individual “act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself.” Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 26–28.

11 The paradox of subjectivation in Foucault's conception of the subject is revealing: it is through subjection that a subject is formed—in other words, the capacity for action is made possible and produced through specific relations of subordination.

12 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd edition, (tr.) Ross, David (Oxford, 2009), p. 23 Google Scholar.

13 Mauss, Marcel, “Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, Mauss, Marcel, (tr.) Brewster, Ben (London, 1979), pp. 95–120 Google Scholar.

14 Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Asad, “The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 289. See also Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993), pp. 75–76 Google Scholar; and Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003), pp. 251–52Google Scholar.

16 Khaldun, Ibn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, (tr.) Rosenthal, Franz (New York, 1958), p. 346 Google Scholar. In considering the classical Islamic tradition of adab as the foundation of the soul or personality of the human being as a whole, Ira Lapidus explores the Khaldunian idea of malaka/habitus along with the relevant work of classical Muslim scholars Miskawaih (d. 1030) and al- Ghazzali (d. 1111). Adab in this tradition means correct knowledge and behaviour in the entire process by which an individual is trained, guided, and fashioned into a good Muslim. Lapidus, Ira, “Knowledge, Virtue and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfillment in Islam,” in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, (ed.) Metcalf, Barbara (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 38–61 Google Scholar.

17 While illuminating the conception of salat (ritual prayer) guiding the Egyptian women's mosque movement, Saba Mahmood also draws on the Aristotelian formulation of habitus, which means “an acquired excellence at either a moral or a practical craft, learned through repeated practice until that practice leaves a permanent mark on the character of the person.” Mahmood, Politics of Piety, p. 136. For Mahmood's critique of Bourdieu's notion of habitus for its inherent socioeconomic determinism and inattention to the pedagogical process entailed in habitus-formation, see ibid., pp. 138–139.

18 See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, p. 76; and idem, ‘Reading a Modern Classic: Smith, W. C.'s “The Meaning and End of Religion,”’ History of Religions 40: 3 (2001), pp. 205–222 Google Scholar.

19 Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

20 Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

21 See Mahmood, Politics of Piety, pp. 131–139.

22 This should not be taken to mean that Islamic Revival movements such as the one studied by Mahmood and Hirschkind do not show any influence of Sufism. Indeed, as Hirschkind notes, the contemporary da‘wa movement in Egypt has incorporated the Sufi-inspired tradition of “linking the realization of ethical being with the resonant body,” while rejecting many aspects of Islamic mysticism. Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape, p. 102.

23 Ibid ., p. 82.

24 It should now be clear that my point is not to privilege the ethical performance of Mappila devotional genres at the expense of their aesthetic, stylistic dimensions. My point is simply this: to understand the true “literariness” of Mappila devotional genres, one also needs to take serious note of the performative value of these genres which is in turn facilitated and sustained by the aesthetic and stylistic features of these genres. The dominant tendency in Mappila literary studies is to valorise the formal stylistics of texts at the cost of their social life.

25 This is not to say that the mala genre has been extensively, if not exhaustively, studied. In fact, the performative dimensions of the mala have received scant scholarly attention—and this is an issue I try to address in my larger work-in-progress on Mappila literary culture. Yet, the mala as a popular type of Mappila songs has been widely celebrated in contemporary Mappila scholarship, although this celebration has largely remained blind to the social production of the genre. Cf. Vallikkunnu, Balakrishnan, Mappilappattu: Oramugha Padhanam (Calicut, 1999)Google Scholar; and idem, Mappila Sahityavum Muslim Navotdhanavum (Calicut, 2008). In contrast, the mawlud has received a raw deal, as it were—there is not even an adequate acknowledgment, let alone celebration, of this genre in mainstream writing on Mappila culture. Cf. Moulavi, C. N. Ahmad and Kareem, K. K. Muhammad Abdul, Mahathaya Mappila Sahitya Parambaryam (Calicut, 1978)Google Scholar; and Kunhi, P. K. Muhammad, Musliminkalum Kerala Samskaravum (Thrissur, 1982)Google Scholar.

26 Needless to say, in the interests of confidentiality, I have changed all the proper nouns referring to institutions and mawlud attendees that figure in the essay. Also, all translations from Malayalam and Arabic are mine, unless otherwise noted.

27 It is beyond the scope of this essay to dwell on the arguments and counter-arguments on the religious legitimacy of the mawlud and the mala as they are played out in debates among Mappilas who either uphold or reject these contentious practices. Since my interest in the essay is to explore what devotional genres do to those Mappilas for whom these genres are integral to the overall programme of realising what they take to be a pious Muslim, I do not have anything to say about this debate here except to note that (a) both sides of the debate invoke orthodoxy or models of “correct practice” in support of their conflicting arguments and consequently I see this debate and contestation as an inherent aspect of the “discursive tradition” of Islam, to follow Asad, Talal, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington D. C., 1986), pp. 14–17 Google Scholar—as a sign of the vibrancy of the tradition rather than a sign of its crisis; (b) both the practitioners and their detractors operate within different “semeiotic ideologies” that presuppose different assumptions about the (mediated) relationship between God and human beings via revered Islamic figures such as the Prophet and Sufis—ideologies that are, nonetheless, anchored in the Islamic tradition; on “semiotic ideology,” see Keane, Webb, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language and Communication 23: 2–3 (2003), pp. 409–425 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, 2007).

28 Incidentally, C. N. Ahmad Moulavi (d. 1993) is himself a prominent leader of the Mujahid movement in Keralite Islam that strongly opposes “traditional” Islamic practices such as the mawlud, saint veneration, and shrine visitation. See Miller, Roland, Mappila Muslims of Kerala: A Study in Islamic Trends (Madras, 1976)Google Scholar; and Kutty, E. K. Ahmad, “The Mujahid Movement and Its Role in the Islamic Revival in Kerala” in Kerala Muslims: A Historical Perspective, (ed.) Engineer, Asghar Ali (Delhi, 1995), pp. 69–72 Google Scholar.

29 Moulavi and Kareem, Mahathaya Mappila Sahitya Parambaryam, p. 153.

30 For a sampling of this “literarisation” approach, see Kunhi, Musliminkalum; and Vallikkunnu, Mappilappattu, and idem, Mappila Sahityavum.

31 I am aware of the other uses of the word “mawlid” or “mulid” such as the death/birth anniversaries of Sufi saints popular in many parts of the Muslim world. While mawlid/mawlud as a literary form thematising the life and virtues of martyrs (shuhada) and Sufi saints is also well-known in Kerala, the word is not usually used to refer to the observance and celebration of the death anniversaries of Sufis and other revered Muslim figures. Instead, the Malayalam word “nercha” (literally, “vow”) is the common name for this practice of saint veneration, although the word urus, a corruption of the Arabic ‘urs, (literally “wedding”), which is much popular among the rest of Muslims on the Indian subcontinent as a term to signify celebration of a Sufi's death anniversary, is also now gaining some traction among Mappilas. Interestingly, it is the birth in the case of the Prophet and the death in the case of revered martyrs and Sufi figures that more usually serve as the occasion for annual devotional festivity for Mappilas as elsewhere in many Muslim societies.

32 It is interesting that even Mappila religious scholars called “musliyars” who are aware of the semantic nuances of both mawlid and mawlud sometimes prefer the latter in their sermons and conversations. Thus, instead of seeing this as a misnomer coming out of Mappilas’ lack of command of Arabic, I want to see it as a means by which Mappilas domesticated and made their own the Arabic mawlid narratives and the larger Muslim practice of the mawlid celebration. Not unlike mawlid, the word “mawlud” indicates both the festive practice of the observance of the Prophet's birthday and the literary form tied to such practice among Mappilas.

33 It is men who participate in mawluds held at mosques, as women are not allowed access to the mosque for religious reasons among the larger section of the Mappila community. However, both men and women participate in the mawlud held outside of the mosque—in households, public halls, etc., although both will be sexually segregated, again, in accord with the demands of proper Islamic conduct these Mappilas aspire to. For reasons of religiously-demanded sexual segregation, I have not been able to observe and document the dynamics of women's participation in mawlud and all of my data comes from attending and taking part in men's mawluds, as it were, (many of which women would also join in an adjacent room/hall—which was inaccessible to me—when mawluds are held off mosque).

34 Of course, I am talking about the bare minimums here: the materials used to add colour and vigour to the mawlud occasion vary from place to place, household to household. As for the number of attendees at the mawlud, it also differs across occasions, venues, etc. Of the mawluds I have attended, the ones held in the Huda Masjid at Kizhisseri in the first twelve days of Rabi‘ul Awwal had 40–50 attendees on an average. In the same mosque, the birthday of the Prophet drew more than one hundred participants to the early morning mawlud recitation. In households, I have attended mawluds where the number of participants ranged from 10 to 20 to 30, and even more, depending on the size and scale of the ritual events.

35 Cf. Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.

36 Nadwi, Bahauddin Muhammad, “Ishqinte Makhdumian Bhavangal” in Pravachaka Prakirthanam (Chemmad, 2006)Google Scholar.

37 My use of the word “Sunni” needs a qualification in keeping with its popular use in Keralite Islam: Sunni here exclusively refers to the majority of Mappila Muslims of Kerala who follow the Shafii school of Islamic law, often dubbed “traditionalists” by the “reformist” Salafi groups because of their participation in contentious Islamic practices such as the mawlud and saint veneration—the seemingly “polytheistic” practices from the Salafi point of view. Sunnis are the followers of the “traditionalist” ulama organisation Samastha Kerala Jam‘iyyathul Ulama (“Samastha,” for short) or its splinter groups. The foremost “reformist” Islamic group in Kerala is Kerala Nadwathul Mujahideen (K. N. M.) with its own breakaway factions, and its supporters are known as “Mujahids.” On Islamic groups in Kerala, see Miller, Mappila Muslims of Kerala; Kutty, “The Mujahid Movement”; Samad, M. Abdul, Islam in Kerala: Groups and Movements in the Twentieth Century (Kollam, 1998)Google Scholar; and Osella, Filippo and Osella, Caroline, “Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala, South India,” Modern Asian Studies 42: 2/3 (2008), pp. 317–346 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Throughout this essay, when I say “Mappilas” I am thinking of “Sunni Mappilas,” unless otherwise stated, as it is to them that Mappila devotional genres such as the mawlud and the mala carry recitative and performative value geared to the programme of ethical formation.

38 It has been argued by some Mappila researchers that the correct title of this popular mawlud is not manqus, meaning “abridged” or “shortened” but mankus, meaning “upside-down”— drawn from a reference in the mawlud to the miracle of all the idols on the earth falling upside down (wa aswbahat aswnamu al-dunya kulluha mankusatan) at the time of the Prophet's birth (Abdu Rahman Mangad, personal communication, dated 25 January 2013). I am less persuaded by this argument, not only because it rests on a laboured interpretation of the etymology of the mawlud’s title with little evidence, internal or otherwise, to that effect but also because the interpretation dose not stand the test of Arabic grammar. For if the title referred to “the idols fallen upside-down,” then the appropriate adjective to use would be the feminine “mankusat(un),” not the masculine “mankus(un),” because since aswnam, the plural form of the inanimate noun swanam (idol), is of the feminine gender, the adjective that qualifies it should also take the feminine form, according to standard Arabic grammar.

39 While there are many other mawlud texts popular among Mappilas, including Badr Mawlud (in honour of the holy martyrs of the famous Battle of Badr in early Muslim history), I confine my analysis and ethnographic account to Manqus and Sharrafa al-Anam, the two most famous mawlud texts, that are often combined in performance at the mawluds I have attended. My own view is that focusing on mawluds where these two texts are recited— mostly in part—is sufficient to give us a fairly good sense of how the mawlud as a devotional genre plays a constitutive role in the self-fashioning of Mappilas.

40 In this essay I have referred to the texts of Manqus and Sharraf al-Anam as they appear in the sabeena 151 Vaka Mawlid Kitab (C. H. Ibrahim Kutty and Brothers, n. d).

41 Kareem, K. K. Muhammad Abdul, Rasikashiromani Kunhayin Musliyarude Kappappattum Nulmadhum (Tirur, 1983), pp. 29–31 Google Scholar.

42 There are popular mawlud occasions held at regular intervals in different parts of Malappuram district of northern Kerala. Examples are the weekly mawlud of Mundambra and the famous local mawlud (nattu mawlud) of Tanur. Mundambra is a village near Areacode town in Malappuram. The weekly mawlud here is held every Monday night at the local mosque and it involves the recitation of the Manqus Mawlud. It was reportedly started about a century ago at the behest of a local scholar who suggested the mawlud recitation as a cure when cholera broke out at Mundambra, leaving a trail of death over the area. Tanur is a coastal town in Malappuram. The annual local mawlud festival held here on Friday nights of the Islamic month of Rabi‘ul Aqir, again, was started more than a century ago as a cure for cholera and plague that were raging through the locality. The Tanur local mawlud includes recitation of constellations of mawlud texts, including the Manqus Mawlud, Muhyiddin Mawlud (a mawlud in honour of the Sufi master Shaikh Muhyiddin Abdul Qadir al-Jilani), and Rifaii Mawlud (a mawlud venerating the Sufi leader Shaikh Ahmad al-Kabir al-Rifaii)—all circulating in the Mappila prayer book called mawlud kitab/sabeena. Cf. K. V. Abdulla Faizy, Manqus Mawlid: Paribhasha-Vyakhyanam (Kottkkal, 2008). On a personal note, I have participated in the local mawlud festival at Tanur once, although I did so more as a practitioner than as an ethnographer. However, my ethnographic data in this essay does not concern either the Mundambra Mawlud or the Tanur Mawlud. Nonetheless, I believe that field analysis of these popular mawlud gatherings will yield greater insight into the sociality of many contemporary Mappilas.

43 Katz, Marion, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (London, 2007), pp. 82–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Daffmuttu is a popular Mappila art form in which the performers beat daffu (also daf), a type of frame drum, and make set movements to the tune of accompanying songs which extol the virtues of the Prophet and other religiously important figures such as the Prophet's companions and Sufis.

45 al-Bukhari, Muhammad, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 1, (tr.) Khan, Muhammad Muhsin (Lahore 1983), p. 20 Google Scholar.

46 For a useful summary, see Katz, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad.

47 Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India.

48 Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India on the mala genre in Mappila literary culture. I cannot, however, explore this topic here for want of space. See my discussion of the mala genre in Muneer Aram Kuzhiyan, Poetics of Piety: Genre, Devotion, and Self-Fashioning in the Mappila Literary Culture of South India (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, 2015).