Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia ─ Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers

This book discusses the role of popular Islam in structuring individual and collective identities in contemporary South Asia. It identifies similarities and differences between the worship of saints and the pattern of religious attendance to tombs and mausoleums in South Asian Sufism and Shi`ism.

Inspired by new advances in the field of ritual and pilgrimage studies, the contributors demonstrate in that religious gatherings are spaces of negotiation and redefinitions of religious identity and of the notion of sainthood. Drawing from a large corpus of vernacular and colonial sources, but also from the register of popular literature and ethnographic observation, the authors describe how religious identities are co-constructed through the management of rituals, and constantly renegociated through discourses and religious practices.

This book enables students, researchers and academics to critically understand the complexity of religious places within the world of popular and devotional Islam. This remapping of geography of Muslim religious gatherings in contemporary South Asia also contributes to a new understanding of the subject in terms of South Asian and Islamic Studies.

Michel Boivin is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS, CNRSEHESS), Paris, Frances.

Remy Delage is coordinator of a research project on religious minorities in contemporary India at the Centre for Human Sciences (CSH) in New Delhi (India) and a team member of the French Study Group on Sindh, headed by Michel Boivin at the EHESS in Paris.