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At the end of the bustling alleyway that wends its way from the busy thoroughfare of Mathura Road and into the heart of New Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighborhood is the Sufi shrine of the saint Nizamuddin Auliya; at the mouth of this lane is the headquarters of the Muslim reformist group, the Tablighi Jama’at. As one walks through this alleyway, the

clots of young Tablighi Jama’at missionaries (with their characteristic chest-length beards, lose tunics and pajamas that stop just above their ankles), and the shops and stalls selling reformist literature, prayer-beads, skull caps and kababs give way to the world of the Sufi shrine, with streams of men, women and children making their way to the sacred space of the shrine ahead. At this end, one passes small cubby holes selling rose-petals and incense, prayer-beads and amulets, colorful posters and trinkets with Sufi themes, CDs and cassettes of Qawwali performances, and booklets with hagiographies, histories of famous shrines, prayers and Quranic verses. This journey, from the mouth of the alleyway to its heart, is in many ways a lived metaphor for a journey between two ways in which Sufism is imagined.

Across the road from this alleyway is the tomb complex of the Mughal king, Humayun. A large quadrangle here enclosed by crumbling 16th century walls witnessed the annual Jahan-e Khusro Sufi music concert series in mid-February 2010. One of the performers at this event, Rabbi Shergil, introduced himself as a “part-time Sufi, and a

full-time rocker”. A guest of honor present at this concert, a member of the current government, said at the start of the concert that Sufism was one face of Islam, while

terrorism was another face of Islam, and it was up to the world to decide which face of Islam we will have. This was met with a round of applause from the largely upper-class audience. But, interestingly, this was the only time the word ‘Islam’ made an appearance during the entire event. There was no mention of Allah or Muhammad, except when it was part of a Qawwali that was sung. This was in some sense, Sufism without Islam, and here we find a third imagining of Sufism.

Adherents of shrine-based Sufism must contend with all of these ways in which Sufism is conceptualized: their own, the way reformists construct an ideal of Sufism, and the way spiritualists and secularists construct it. And it is vis-à-vis the latter two (often competing) conceptualizations that adherents of shrine-based Sufism must assert their own identity as Sufi Muslims in India. I think of these two different ways of

conceptualizing Sufism as pressures to be not just a certain kind of a Sufi, but

fundamentally, a certain kind of Muslim. Any assertion of a Muslim identity by adherents of shrine-based Sufism is thus a negotiation between these pressures.

Pressure from reformist groups comes in the form of critique of shrine practice and belief. As has been discussed in chapter 2, and as is suggested by the term

designating them, the goal of many reformists is to reform Sufism. At a basic level, it is a goal to alter the character of contemporary Sufism, to make it conform to reformist interpretations of Islamic doctrine. To assert their identity as Muslims vis-à-vis this strong opposition, adherents of shrine-based Sufism must establish their practices and beliefs as fundamentally Islamic – not just as compatible with Islam, but as being inalienably Muslim.

Secularists and spiritualists in India pose a very different kind of problem for adherents of shrine-based Sufism. While reformist opposition is quite overt and obviously adversarial in many cases, the pressures on religious identity that come from secularists and spiritualists are not so apparent, and are in fact couched in a pro-Sufi stance. In chapter 3, I discussed the kind of religious subjecthood that the Indian nation- state favors. While this kind of religious subjecthood is ostensibly valenced towards shrine-based Sufism, it too undermines the Muslim identity of its adherents. Claiming a staunchly Muslim identity in this context also involves an assertion of Sufism’s Islamic

roots. But such an assertion must not at the same time be seen to negate other forms of identity and belonging that are equally important to Muslims in India: linguistic, regional, cultural and national.

These two sources of pressure on their religiosity leave adherents of shrine-based Sufism in a bind: where the very perception of Sufism as not quite Muslim positions them as outsiders to one faction, and as part of the in-group to the other. In the previous chapters I have delineated these two sometimes competing pressures in detail. In this chapter, I will examine how the identity-narratives of adherents of shrine-based Sufism is a response to both these pressures, and how their assertion of religious and national identity navigates between these.

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In her book Arguing Sainthood (1997), Ewing posits a “return to an older usage of the concept of hegemony as a control over public discursive space, a phenomenon that must be distinguished from consciousness” (p. 5). She elaborates: