Introduction

Practices and rituals that have religious origins are often studied scripturally, to validate them or to explain their deviance from prescribed scriptural tradition. However, such scholarship that is based on the textual understanding of lived religions attempts to reconcile practices with nominal and normative prescriptions. Religious practices and rituals are transformed through time, being constantly reinterpreted in their cognitive, material, and performative aspects. The living societies that enact religious rituals themselves are constantly evolving, and specific contingencies of culture, history, and location inform their practices. The Nawabs of Awadh, for example, encouraged a cosmopolitan mixing of their population, and encouraged their Hindu subjects to partake of Muharram observances in the mourning rituals. Muharram became open to non-Shia and indeed non-Muslim participants as an act of political consolidation and also as courtly fashion.