ABSTRACT
This essay inaugurates a reading of agency through the poetics and politics of the sacred space of Shia mourning rituals, facilitated by the community women who participate in the ritual and act on that space. Here, Shia women in several fringes of the city of Kolkata offer their lives as they inhabit everyday to engage with the sacred space – the imambaras – where the Shias gather to remember and lament over the martyrdom of Prophet’s grandson Imam Husayn in the battle of Karbala (AD 680) as the core of their religious sensibility. To study the integral connection between religiosity, religious identity, gender, and women’s agency under the prism of my ethnographic observations (2011–14) in several Shia quarters in the city of Kolkata, I have taken ‘place-making’ as my analytical category that emerged out of the congregation and exchange of social groups in the private and public spheres. The sacred space becomes the ‘place.’ not for its sacred attribute but for how these women take part, engage with, and inhabit it. The ‘urban’ settings, which act as the site for the sacred mourning of the Shias, my essay shows, simultaneously facilitate the dynamic forms of the ritual performances – the muharram complex.
