ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of everyday religion and religiosity performed by Shia Muslims in Kolkata as markers of their ghettoized identity. It examines Imambaras (the primary space for Shia ritual mourning) in Kolkata as sites of urban contestation. Much ethnographic scholarship focuses on the idea of the ‘Muslim Ghetto’ as a product of socio-economic and spatial marginalization, reinforced by the self-segregation of the community as a safety measure. But the Shia question remains less explored, although the commemoration of Muharram places Shias in a precarious position as a doubly marginalized community vis-à-vis the Sunni majority among Indian Muslims. Sunnis denounce Shia ritual mourning for its raw physicality, for its renegade insistence upon an intercessory piety directed towards Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Husayn, and for claiming a prophetic inheritance that goes directly against the Sunni caliphate. I read the Imambaras not as pure ritual spaces but as contested sites, where the Shias struggle to inculcate new symbolic meanings to affirm their identity as a doubly minoritized community. I offer ethnographic studies of three Imambaras in Kolkata in the broader context of a trans-territorial, multi-local network of belonging for Shias.
